Programming Mobile Services for Android Handheld Systems: Communication

The course is organized into the following sections:

• Section 0: Course Introduction
  • Part 1:Course Structure and Topics
    
  • Part 2: Course Prerequisites and Learning Strategies
• Section 1: Android Services and Local IPC
  
• Part 1: Overview of Started and Bound Services
  
• Part 2: Activity and Service Communication
• Part 3: Service to Activity Communication Using Android Messenger
• Part 4: Programming Started Services
• Part 5: Android IntentService
• Part 6: Programming Bound Services with Messengers
  
• Part 7: Overview of the Android Interface Definition Language (AIDL)
• Part 8: Programming Bound Services with AIDL
• Section 3: Android Remote IPC
  
• Part 1: Overview of Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
  
• Part 2: Designing Mobile Applications with HTTP Communication
• Part 3: Better Client-side Communication Abstractions for HTTP
• Section 4:  Communication Patterns in Android
  • Part 1: Activating Services on Demand with the Activator Pattern
  • Part 2: Passing Commands to Services with the Command Processor Pattern
  • Part 3: Automating Marshaling and Demarshaling of Data with the Proxy Pattern
  • Part 4: Supporting Object-Oriented Remote Method Calls with the Broker Pattern

Throughout the MOOC we'll focus on pattern-oriented software architecture, with an emphasis on concurrent and networked programming in the context of Android middleware systems programming mechanisms, such as synchronous and asynchronous concurrency models, background service processing, and local/remote inter-process communication (IPC) and networking. We illustrate by example how key pattern and framework concepts and relationships are applied in Android Services and various local and remote IPC mechanisms from both an application and infrastructure perspective. Many code examples are shown throughout using Java, with a case study project used to reify the key points throughout all the modules in this section.

The PDF and PowerPoint versions of all the slides used in the course will be available online as the videos become available on the course website.