Question

First, I should be clear by providing a little background: I’m using Eclipse to develop an Android application that plots Bluetooth data. It consists primarily of a Bluetooth Activity, a background thread created by the Bluetooth Activity, and a Plotting Activity.

The primary focus of my question: Once the Plotting Activity is known to be active, what approach can I use to send BluetoothData from the background thread to the Plotting Activity so I can plot it?

This is open source code that I am hacking. Using Logcat I know for a fact that the Bluetooth Activity created a background thread for continually producing BluetoothData even after the Bluetooth Activity is gone. And I have found the background method that logs the BluetoothData to Logcat. Now I want to leverage this method to send BluetoothData to the active Plotting Activity so I can plot it.

I can tell you what appears to work. Interested? Define a static method, plotData(BluetoothData) in the Plotting Activity and call if from the background thread. Clips along in real-time just fine. The plots are nice. But I’ve been told I shouldn’t have to use static methods as though there is some problem with that. So what else should I use?

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You shouldn’t use a background thread. Instead you should use a Service that collects the data. In this case every activity you create can bind to that service and be informed if new data was received. With a handler, the service can easily send the data to the activity that is binded.

A little question: Can you please explain why there should be a problem with static methods and more precisely: which kind of problems?