This document summarizes the author's experiences with Android development over the past few months. It discusses adopting a design-first process, using Android Studio as the IDE, and exploring various libraries including Guava, Butterknife, ORMLite, GreenDao, EventBus, and Android Priority JobQueue for background tasks such as image uploads. The author found EventBus and JobQueue most useful for communicating between app components and handling background tasks including offline support.

1. Android Development War
Stories
by Lope Emano
April-September 2014

4. Seriously though.

5. The Format
Share and discuss experiences in an app
you’ve built and/or the new things you’ve
learned the past few months.

6. Things I’ve learned the past few months

7. New Design-First process is kewl
First two weeks:
❖ Researched existing similar apps
(advantages and disadvantages)
❖ Watched Android Design In Action videos
❖ Sketched designs/layouts using pencil and
paper via printed out stencil kit

9. Currently in my wishlist, waiting for
Material version

10. New Design-First process is kewl
❖ Demo app to product owner in front of
photoshop for insta changes
❖ Acquaint designer with terms like "actionbar,
navigation bar, status bar, overflow" for easy
communication
❖ Android asset studio
❖ Look around for potential tools
❖ Sketch (mac app w/ android plugin) seems to
be gaining traction and is considered as a
better alternative to PS.

11. IDE

12. Android Studio
❖ Used it and haven’t looked back since
❖ IntelliJ is still supporting its android plugin
❖ Gradle + gradle integration is relatively faster
than Maven
❖ You can port eclipse shortcuts to Android
Studio, it’s a built in config.

13. Libraries

14. Guava
- Light and useful
- Used only MultiMap and StringUtils
- Still have a lot to learn!

15. No need for ActionBarSherlock
- Android support library can now suffice

16. Butterknife
❖ Very light weight
❖ @InjectView, @OnClick, @OnItemClick,
@InjectView within ViewHolder
❖ You can inject your ViewHolder
❖ A Jake Wharton project

17. Ormlite
❖ ORM for SQLite w/ android support
❖ annotations for field -> property mapping
❖ powerful Dao
❖ learned about extending BaseDao
❖ still figuring out how connections get
closed

18. GreenDao
❖ ORM designed to be fast and lightweight
❖ way faster than ORMLite
❖ Asynchronous API

19. FTS/Full Text Search on SQLite
❖ Found out FTS is supported on SQLite
❖ Not supported on ORMLite so used
SQLCursor
❖ Limited to prefix search:
“a” will return [“apple”, “anderson”]
“pple” will return [ ]

20. EventBus
“Eventbus is one of the most badass things
that has happened to me as an android
developer”
-Lope Emano

23. When I saw those two slides, I didn’t
really realize what it implied.

24. Why EventBus is a lifesaver
❖ No need to pass ids between activities via
intent bundles
❖ Passing objects from activities to
fragments is much easier
❖ Said my goodbye to parcelables
❖ Communication from background thread to
main thread is easier

25. Why EventBus can be dangerous
Prone to memory leaks
EventBus stores a listmap of subscribers of
different types of events. If you forget to
unregistered a registered object then eventbus will
hold that object forever
Very Addictive
EventBus even when you don’t need it and thus
ending up with an app with so many events

26. Check it out!
http://www.slideshare.net/greenrobot/eventbus-for-android-15314813

27. My hardest battle

28. ❖ I needed to upload some images to a
server in a background thread.
❖ I needed to move around the app without
the upload getting cancelled.

29. AsyncTask
❖ Worked well but when I left the activity the
I/O stream for reading the image would
get closed.

30. Volley
❖ Popular due to I/O presentation
❖ Found a hard time to find the source code
and jar files plus I found something more
mature and well documented
❖ I think google is planning on integrating
this with SDK
❖ Mirrors available

31. RoboSpice
❖ Launched a service to do long running
background processes
❖ Was relatively easy to set up.
❖ There was a learning curve but it wasn't
that steep.

32. RoboSpice got me to where I wanted but
then I realized I wanted something more- an
offline mode for the app.

33. Android Priority JobQueue

34. Android Priority Jobqueue (Job Manager)
❖ Path project written mostly by yigit
❖ Supported Offline Mode
❖ Supported Network State Listeners
❖ Supported Job Priority
❖ Supported Job Sequencing
❖ Supported Dependency Injection (was
able to integrate it easily with dagger)

35. Comprehensive sample available!
https://github.com/path/android-priority-jobqueue/
tree/master/examples/twitter

36. Thanks!