Threaded Download Bound Service Demo (Assignment 5)

Overview

This assignment builds upon the various Android concurrency models from the third assignment and fourth assignment to give you experience with two variants of an Android Bound Service to download bitmap images from a web server and display them via an Activity that communicates to the Bound Services via AIDL. This Activity has a similar user interface as assignment 4 and works as follows:

Note that the results will look somewhat different if you use a real Android smartphone vs. using the AVD emulator shown in the screenshots above.


Program Description

This assignment involves writing an Android program that has the following features:

The entire layout of the application must be structured by the contents of the Android resource files described via XML, i.e., you must not hard-code any TextView, EditText, or Button objects into your DownloadActivity class.


Implementation Considerations

The following are implementation considerations for assignment 5:


Concluding Remarks

This programming assignment builds upon the previous two assignments, but should actually be somewhat less code to write since AIDL and the Android Binder will do more of the work for you (once you figure out how they work). I'm not providing any skeleton code this time, so feel free to design your solution as you see fit.

There's a great deal of useful information on Android AIDL and Binder available on the web and in your textbook, but make sure not to blindly copy and paste it..


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