AsyncTask and IntentService

Question

I was disappointed using GCM, so I'll use long polling for crucial parts. Following my approach:

protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    new LongPolling().execute();
}

private class LongPolling extends AsyncTask<String, Void, String> {

    @Override
    protected String doInBackground(String... params) {
        HttpClient hclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
        HttpPost httpr = new HttpPost(new URL("http://10.0.2.2/page.php").toURI());
        HttpResponse response = hclient.execute(httpr);
        String result = EntityUtils.toString(response.getEntity());
        return result;
    }

    @Override
    protected void onPostExecute(String result) {
        new LongPolling().execute(); 
    }

}

Is it the right approach for the long polling, or do you want to suggest a better approach? Also, a IntentService starts when you turn on the phone to run that code, would be better to use a Service?

Answer 1

About long polling

To clarify about long polling, from wikipedia:

With long polling, the client requests information from the server exactly as in normal polling, except it issues its HTTP/S requests (polls) at a much slower frequency. If the server does not have any information available for the client when the poll is received, instead of sending an empty response, the server holds the request open and waits for response information to become available. Once it does, the server immediately sends an HTTP/S response to the client, completing the open HTTP/S Request. In this way the usual response latency (the time between when the information first becomes available and the next client request) otherwise associated with polling clients is eliminated.

In particular, paraphrasing the key points:

• The client issues its requests at a slow frequency: this is not true in your implementation, you poll the server in sequence without an explicit delay in between requests. But maybe you're ok with that.
• When the information is not available at the time of the request, the server holds the request open, and responds when the information is ready: this is to implement on the server side, of course, and not visible in the posted code.

About your main questions

Is it the right approach for the long polling, or do you want to suggest a better approach? Also, a IntentService starts when you turn on the phone to run that code, would be better to use a Service?

An AsyncTask calling itself repeatedly... sounds a bit strange. Also, the doc says this:

AsyncTasks should ideally be used for short operations (a few seconds at the most.) If you need to keep threads running for long periods of time, it is highly recommended you use the various APIs provided by the java.util.concurrent pacakge such as Executor, ThreadPoolExecutor and FutureTask.

Although a single polling action is short, your desired behavior is repeated polling for presumably a long time (you did not include a termination condition). As such, an IntentService sounds like a better approach:

In most cases an IntentService is the preferred way to simple background operations.

Code review

Although following the recommendations above you might well reimplement using an IntentService, the original code has some interesting issues worth reviewing:

1. The AsyncTask is defined to return a String, but it's not used at all. You can get rid of that, and then you won't need the EntityUtils.toString call anymore

2. The code in your post doesn't catch exception, even though some should be thrown, for example IOException during HTTP requests. You should add some error handling for that.

3. Instead of hardcoding the URL inside the class, it would be better to make it a parameter (initialize in the constructor).

Something like this:

private class LongPolling extends AsyncTask<String, Void, Void> {
    private final URI uri;

    private LongPolling(URI uri) {
        this.uri = uri;
    }

    @Override
    protected Void doInBackground(String... params) {
        try {
            HttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
            HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(uri);
            httpClient.execute(httpPost);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            // server down? maybe you should let the client know!
        }
        return null;
    }

    @Override
    protected void onPostExecute(Void aVoid) {
        new LongPolling(uri).execute();
    }
}