In an app I am designing, I have a back end service connected to a communication bus collecting a bunch of data and communicating with remote devices. I have a front end (UI) in another APK and process.
I need to have quite a bit of data, communication events and user events flowing at very high speeds (microseconds) between these two processes. Here’s an example: Process A might receive a block of data that makes up a bitmap image via the communications bus. Since this process is not in the main UI thread I cannot use the Canvas and Bitmap classes to create an actual bitmap, all I can do is just store the data. Process B (the UI thread) needs this data to actually create and display a bitmap image. Passing the data from Process B to Process A needs to happen very fast – hopefully like the amount of time a call from one method to another occurs in the same process.
As a newbie to Android, I am struggling with this concept. I have looked at AIDL and it looks promising, but I don’t know yet.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to share data back and forth between two processes at reasonably high speed?
You are right, the best thing to communicate between processes in Android is AIDL.
The only possible way I can imagine to improve performance even more – is to share memory between processes. However I think you’ll need to go low-level for this.
You can check for example this article: http://www.androidenea.com/2010/03/share-memory-using-ashmem-and-binder-in.html
However, in most cases, AIDL should be pretty fast.
Good luck