Question

I’m new to Android development. I’ve be working on Swing and SWT for several years. Both Swing and SWT has a stratage to execute code in UI thread sync and async. The typical usage is doing some time-consume staff in one thread then display the result in UI thread async.

So my question is, is there similiar stratage in Android? Here is my code. Parameter runnable is some time-consume code. This method will display a waiting dialog during the execution then EXPECT to show a Toast after it is finished. But the Toast need to be show in UI thread. So how to do that?

    public static void showWaitingDialog(final Activity parent, final Runnable runnable, String msg) {

    if (StringUtils.isEmpty(msg)) {
        msg = "processing...";
    }

    final ProgressDialog waitingDialog = ProgressDialog.show(parent, "Please Wait...", msg, true);

    // execute in a new thread instead of UI thread
    ThreadPoolUtil.execute(new Runnable() {

        public void run() {
            try {
                // some time-consume operation
                runnable.run();
            } catch (Exception e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            } finally {
                waitingDialog.dismiss();
            }
            // TODO: How to display a Toast message here? execute some code in UI Thread.

        }

    });

}

And is there some words about Android UI system? Such as is it Thread-Safe, how thread works together and so on. Many Thanks!

Answer 1

There are several ways for doing that,

• AsyncTask –

AsyncTask enables proper and easy use of the UI thread. This class
allows to perform background operations and publish results on the UI
thread without having to manipulate threads and/or handlers. Example for using AsyncTask

• Service –

A Service is an application component representing either an
application’s desire to perform a longer-running operation while not
interacting with the user or to supply functionality for other
applications to use. Example for Using Service.

• IntentService –

IntentService is a base class for Services that handle asynchronous
requests (expressed as Intents) on demand. Clients send requests
through startService(Intent) calls; the service is started as needed,
handles each Intent in turn using a worker thread, and stops itself
when it runs out of work. Example for using IntentService.