I'm not sure I agree with your comment that it is the wrong question. In fact your explanation of how a majority of the cases a Service runs in the same process is precisely why most people will consider these as alternatives. I was trying to point out to the OP that if the OP ever wanted to create something that lived independent of the UI and/or was planned to be used by more than one activity independently developed/distributed, a service would be a better choice...
IMHO the AsyncTask is notoriously poorly documented. It has some really strange interactions with the Activity lifecycle... As some one pointed out the IntentService is probably a better choice in many cases. Which again brings to question the orthogonality of AsyncTask & Service... On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 5:09 AM, Dianne Hackborn <hack...@android.com> wrote: > On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 2:07 PM, Prakash Iyer <thei...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Service, OTOH, is designed to work in the background without requiring >> user interaction. Problem is that for your Activity to display the results >> it must somehow interact with your service. Ideally you will want to spawn >> the service off in a separate process and use either Intents or AIDL to >> communicate back progress to the Activity. >> > > The vast majority of the time, there is no need to run the service in a > separate process and thus deal with all of the additional complexity of AIDL > and such. > > As another poster mentioned, IntentService is very useful. > > Also "AsyncTask vs. Service" is the wrong question. These are almost > totally orthogonal to each other -- you very often may use an AsyncTask as > part of implementing a service for example. > > And if your service is running in the same process as your activity, it is > very easy to just bind to it from the activity, call on to it to get its > current state, and supply a callback for when the state changes, just using > normal Java coding. > > -- > Dianne Hackborn > Android framework engineer > hack...@android.com > > Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to > provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails. All such > questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and > answer them. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Android Developers" group. > To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<android-developers%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com> > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
