April 2012
Intermediate to advanced
552 pages
14h 22m
English
book
Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android and .NET/C#
by Wallace B. McClure, Nathan Blevins, John J. Croft IV, Jonathan Dick, Chris Hardy
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Chapter 11
Developing Background Services and Asynchronous Code
What's in This Chapter?
- The life cycle of a service
- Getting it done with threads
- Using services and activities
- Working with the UI
- Communicating with notifications
- Setting alarms
- Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM)
Unlike some other mobile operating systems, Android allows and even encourages the use of background processing using a variety of mechanisms to do things independently of a user interface. This allows applications to listen for broadcast intents from other applications or services, stay updated on location data, and even communicate over the Internet with other services, all without requiring the application's user interface to be running.
Separating the user interface from background processing is critical in creating efficient applications. There's no need to hold memory for a user interface when all your application is doing is polling a web service.
Android provides several mechanisms for processing in the background. Services don't even need to always be running. Android can wake up a service to do its processing in the background based on a scheduled time or interval, or when another thread or application broadcasts an intent in which the service is interested.
In this chapter you learn all about services and running code in the background, outside of the main application thread. You discover how to communicate updates from your background code to the user through notifications, as well as how to communicate ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.