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

[Summers Pittman]

On 02/14/2013 03:10 AM, Matthias Wessendorf wrote:
> Hi summers,
>
> the issues around the Activity, are they valid for our auth offerings
> (e.g. login + callback) and the store (+ its callbacks) ?
AFAIK Stores don't use callbacks so they aren't an issue, but the issues 
are also valid for auth.
>
> -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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>
>