The document discusses various tools and techniques the author has learned about and used for Android development over the past few months. These include using a design-first process with sketching, using libraries like Guava, Butterknife and Ormlite, implementing full text search in SQLite, using EventBus for communication between components, and using RoboSpice and Android Priority JobQueue for asynchronous background tasks including image uploads. The author notes both advantages and disadvantages of these approaches.

1. Android Development War
Stories
by Lope Emano
April-June 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

8. 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

9. Libraries

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

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

12. Butterknife
❖ Very light weight
❖ @InjectView, @Click, @OnItemClick,
@InjectView within ViewHolder
❖ A Jake Wharton project

13. 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

14. 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 [ ]

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

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

19. 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

20. 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

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

22. My hardest battle

23. ❖ 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.

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

25. 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

26. 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.

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

28. Android Priority JobQueue

29. 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)

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

31. Thanks!