[aerogear-dev] Pipes on Android

[Christos Vasilakis]

Hi Summers,

+1 for option #1 using the loader api and support library

As you suggest, android support library is commonly used nowadays, so won't have big impact targeting old versions of Android

Thanks,
Christos

On Feb 14, 2013, at 12:47 AM, Summers Pittman <supittma at redhat.com> wrote:

> 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
> 
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