What this book covers

Chapter 1, Asynchronous Programming in Android, gives an overview of the Android process and thread model, and describes some of the challenges and benefits of concurrency in general, before discussing issues specific to Android.

Chapter 2, Performing Work with Looper, Handler and HandlerThread details the fundamental and related topics of Handler, HandlerThread, and Looper, and illustrates how they can be used to schedule tasks on the main thread, and to coordinate and communicate work between cooperating background threads.

Chapter 3, Exploring the AsyncTask, covers the most common concurrent construct of programming in Android. We learn how AsyncTask works, how to use it correctly, and how to avoid the common pitfalls that catch out even experienced developers.

Chapter 4, Exploring the Loader, introduces the Loader framework and tackles the important task of loading data asynchronously to keep the user interface responsive and glitch free.

Chapter 5, Interacting with Services, we explored the very powerful Service Android component, putting it to use to execute long-running background tasks with or without a configurable level of concurrency. This component gives us the means to perform background operations beyond the scope of a single Activity lifecycle and to ensure that our work is completed even if the user leaves the application.

Chapter 6, Scheduling Work with AlarmManager, introduces to us a system API that could be used to defer work or create periodic tasks. The scheduled task could wake up the device to complete the work or alert users to new content.

Chapter 7, Exploring the JobScheduler API, covers a job scheduling system API introduced with Android Lollipop that allows us to start background work when a set of device conditions, such as energy or network, are fulfilled.

Chapter 8, Interacting with the Network, we cover in detail HttpUrlConnection Android HTTP client. With the HttpUrlConnection HTTP client, we will create an asynchronous toolkit that is able to fetch JSON documents, XML or text from a remote server.

Chapter 9, Asynchronous Work on the Native layer, introduces the JNI interface, an Java standard interface that will allow us to execute concurrent tasks on native code (C/C++), interact with the Java code from the native layer or update the UI from the native code.

Chapter 10, Network Interactions with GCM, we will learn how to use the Google GCM to efficiently push and pull efficiently realtime messages from your server and how to schedule work with Google Play Services framework.

Chapter 11, Exploring Bus-based Communications, we will introduce to the reader the publish-subscribe messaging pattern and the Event Bus Library, a publish-subscribe implementation that allow us to deliver asynchronous messages between Android application components.

Chapter 12, Asynchronous Programing with RxJava, we will introduce RxJava, a library used to easily compose asynchronous and event-based tasks on Java by using observable data streams.