[aerogear-dev] Stores and Auth(was: Re: Pipes on Android)

[Matthias Wessendorf]

Hi summers,

the issues around the Activity, are they valid for our auth offerings
(e.g. login + callback) and the store (+ its callbacks) ?

-M

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 11:47 PM, 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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Matthias Wessendorf

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