Hello, this is the scenario: 1 user has a main activity used for ui. 2 programm needs to communicate with peers and keep connection and wait for messages 3 when a message comes it is shown in the main acivity.
so the question is should I use a service for the communication and what type of service? and also should I use AsyncTask in the service in order to keep my ui responcive and why? thanks maxsap
The important thing here is that any CPU intensive work or blocking I/O (including waiting for incoming network connections) occurs in a thread separate from your main UI thread.
If you just need network communication to stay running while your activity is alive, then use a second thread within your activity. If you need to maintain network communication even after your activity has been killed, you'll need to use a service.
Keep in mind that default behavior is for a service to share the same process and thread as anything else in the same application (including the activity that provides your UI). For this reason, even if you use a service, you'll still need to spawn a new thread to get the desired effect.
AsyncTask is used to perform a task in a separate thread that will eventually terminate and return a result. If this sounds like your application, then feel free to use it. But if you're keeping a port open across several requests (meaning you don't have a single return value), using this class would just be a burden.