[aerogear-dev] Pipes on Android

[Summers Pittman]

Currently, Pipes on Android are implemented using an AsyncTask and the 
callbacks are fired on the UI thread.  In the case where the Activity 
which made the request which launched the task is killed, an application 
using Aerogear will crash.  This is bad. Additionally the internal 
mechanisms of the request itself aren't easily reachable by the 
developer.  This means we can't get status information (is the request 
completed, is there data, cancel the request, etc) easily.

Last week at the F2F I chatted up Matzew and a few other guys and put 
together a Pipe proposal (http://bit.ly/12MzeOx).  I've implemented it 
and ported some example code and it works.  However, it requires a lot 
of boilerplate code to manage the Activity life cycle correctly.  We can 
abstract the boilerplate if we write our own extensions to the base 
Android activity classes and our users extend those classes.  However 
there are about 12 common classes in multiple libraries which can be 
used and it is pain to maintain.

In Android 3.0+ Google provides a Loader API which handles this 
boilerplate on its own.  Even better, they've extended their base 
classes for us.  After doing more research today, I've come to the 
conclusion that Pipe and friends can lean on Loader to do what we want 
with minimal if any API changes.  However, this means on Android 2.3 our 
users will have to include the Android support library.  This is usually 
used by most projects anyway, but it will be something to point out in 
the docs.

So my questions to the list is, which should be done?

In order of my preference:
  1. Use the Loader API and require that users targeting older versions 
of Android include the support libs (which they are probably doing already)
  2. Use the boilerplate heavy API proposal and pass the coding onto the 
user
  3. Make our library 3.0+ only
  4. Extend all the base classes and manage the boilerplate

3 & 4 aren't really good options, but I am including them for completeness.

Summers