Play with this demo

In this Activity, you can :

Loader for REST request.

This Activity uses a Loader to get the list of tweets related to Android.

a Proof of Concepts

It is based on an idea developed by Neil Goodmann in its article : Modern Techniques For Implementing REST Clients On Android 4.0 And below (part 1 and part 2). Neil Goodmann wrote a complete tutorial and made the source code available on a Git Hub repo. We look forward to re-implement the loader using a more standard library for executing rest requests : the spring android RestTemlate, but current RestLoader proposed by Neil Goodmann is mature enough for this demo.

Although the technique doesn't seem to be very well know from Android developers, it's actually a neat solution : it works perfectly and offers a robust approach to asynchronous job execution, without any kind of memory issue.

Progress and loaders

On this demo activity, you can't observe the progress of the Loader's job. But we believe this should be possible.

Cancelling the request

Loaders can be cancelled easily and this applies to this example as well. Note that, once REST request is sent, it can't be aborted. We believe this limitation could be leveraged as well.

Networking operations

Nevertheless, when it comes to networking operations, using Loaders has several drawbacks and limitations that we will summarize as follow :


We now propose a new approach for asynchronous network operations, using RoboSpice. Next tutorial is the exact same application, but spiced. As you will see RoboSpice allows to go far beyond those limitations.