Efficient Android Threading

Chapter 1. Android Components and the Need for Multiprocessing

Before we immerse ourselves in the world of threading, we will start with an introduction to the Android platform, the application architecture, and the application’s execution. This chapter provides a baseline of knowledge required for an effective discussion of threading in the rest of the book, but a complete information on the Android platform can be found in the official documentation or in most of the numerous Android programming books on the market.

Android Software Stack

Applications run on top of a software stack that is based on a Linux kernel, native C/C++ libraries, and a runtime that executes the application code (Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. Android software stack

The major building blocks of the Android software stack are:

Applications

Android applications that are implemented in Java. They utilize both Java and Android framework libraries.

Core Java

The core Java libraries used by applications and the application framework. It is not a fully compliant Java SE or ME implementation, but a subset of the retired Apache Harmony implementation, based on Java 5. It provides the fundamental Java threading mechanisms: the java.lang.Thread class and java.util.concurrent package.

Application framework

The Android classes that handle the window system, UI toolkit, resources, and so on—basically everything that is required ...