Professional Android 4 Application Development, 3rd Edition

Chapter 9

Working in the Background

What's in this Chapter?

Creating, starting, and stopping Services

Binding Services to Activities

Creating ongoing foreground Services

Extending the Intent Service

Using AsyncTasks to manage background processing

Creating background Threads and using Handlers to synchronize with the GUI Thread

Using Alarms to schedule application events

Android offers the Service class to create application components that handle long-lived operations and include functionality that doesn't require a user interface.

Android accords Services a higher priority than inactive Activities, so they're less likely to be killed when the system requires resources. In fact, should the run time prematurely terminate a Service that's been started, it can be configured to restart as soon as sufficient resources become available. When necessary a Service's priority can be raised to the equivalent of a foreground Activity. This is reserved for extreme cases, where the termination of a Service will noticeably affect the user experience—such as an interruption in music playback.

By using Services, you can ensure that your applications can continue to run even when their UI isn't visible.

Although Services run without a dedicated GUI, they still execute in the main Thread of the application's process—just like Activities and Broadcast Receivers. To keep your applications responsive, you'll learn to move time-consuming processes onto background Threads using the Thread and AsyncTask ...