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Home Android core Thread Android Thread Example

ABOUT NIKOS MARAVITSAS

Nikos has graduated from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of The National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
During his studies he discovered his interests about software development and he has successfully completed numerous assignments in
a variety of fields. Currently, his main interests are systems security, parallel systems, artificial intelligence, operating systems, system
programming, telecommunications, web applications, human machine interaction and mobile development.

Android Thread Example

Posted by: Nikos Maravitsas in Thread May 19th, 2013

In this example we are going to see how to use Android

Thread

. As we read from the official documentation:

A
Thread

is a concurrent unit of execution. It has its own call stack for methods being invoked, their arguments and local variables. Each virtual
machine instance has at least one main

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Thread

running when it is started; typically, there are several others for housekeeping. The
application might decide to launch additional
Thread

s for specific purposes.

Thread

s in the same VM interact and synchronize by the use of shared objects and monitors
associated with these objects. Synchronized methods and part of the API in
Object

also allow

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Thread

s to cooperate.
There are basically two main ways of having a
Thread

execute application code. One is providing a new class that extends

Thread

and overriding its

run()

method. The other is providing a new

Thread

instance with a
Runnable

object during its creation. In both cases, the

start()

method must be called to actually execute the new

Thread

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.
Each
Thread

has an integer priority that basically determines the amount of CPU time the
Thread

gets. It can be set using the

setPriority(int)

method. A
Thread

can also be made a daemon, which makes it run in the background. The latter also affects VM termination behavior: the VM does not
terminate automatically as long as there are non-daemon threads running.
For this tutorial, we will use the following tools in a Windows 64-bit platform:
JDK 1.7
Eclipse 4.2 Juno
Android SKD 4.2

1. Create a new Android Project

Open Eclipse IDE and go to File -> New -> Project -> Android -> Android Application Project.You have to specify the Application Name, the
Project Name and the Package name in the appropriate text fields and then click Next.

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In the next window make sure the Create activity option is selected in order to create a new activity for your project, and click Next. This is
optional as you can create a new activity after creating the project, but you can do it all in one step.

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Select BlankActivity and click Next.

You will be asked to specify some information about the new activity. In the Layout Name text field you have to specify the name of the file
that will contain the layout description of your app. In our case the file
res/layout/main.xml

will be created. Then, click Finish.

2. Create the main layout of the Application

Open
res/layout/main.xml

file :

And paste the following code :

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="match_parent"
android:orientation="vertical" >

<ProgressBar
android:id="@+id/progressBar1"
style="?android:attr/progressBarStyleHorizontal"
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:indeterminate="false"
android:max="10"
android:padding="4dip" >
</ProgressBar>

<Button
android:id="@+id/button1"
android:layout_width="match_parent"

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android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:onClick="startProgress"
android:text="Start" />

</LinearLayout>

Now you may open the Graphical layout editor to preview the User Interface you created:

3. Code
Now we have to write the code of the application. Use the Package Explorer to navigate to the Java file of the Activity youve created:

The code of this tutorial is pretty much selfexplanatory. The interesting part is how to update the value of the Progress bar. We are going to
use a
Thread

to run the backgroud process that updates tha value of the progress bar. Although this example works fine, it is strongly advised to use a
Handler or an AsyncTask to explicity bind the backroud thread with the UI thread.
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package com.javacodegeeks.android.androidthreadexample;

import android.app.Activity;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.view.View;
import android.widget.ProgressBar;

public class MainActivity extends Activity {

private ProgressBar bar;

/** Called when the activity is first created. */

@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.main);
bar = (ProgressBar) findViewById(R.id.progressBar1);

public void startProgress(View view) {

bar.setProgress(0);
new Thread(new Task()).start();
}

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class Task implements Runnable {

@Override
public void run() {
for (int i = 0; i <= 10; i++) {
final int value = i;
try {
Thread.sleep(1000);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
bar.setProgress(value);

}
}

4. Run the application

This is the main screen of our Application.

Now, when you press the Start button,the thread that updates the bars value :

Download Eclipse Project

This was an Android Thread Example. Download the Eclipse Project of this tutorial:AndroidThreadExample

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