Google IO 2008 Day Two

HTML 5 - Gears

From a vendor's perspective: You don't win users by being super standards compliant. At best, you don't lose users. Gears targets developers, not users. So, Gears considers standards to be a profit center rather than a cost center. Gears is a playground for new web APIs. One such example is SQL in Gears, which once proven successful in Gears, was included in HTML5.

Dalvik VM Internals:
Dalvik is designed to run on a slow CPU, with relatively low RAM, and on an OS without swap space while powered by a battery. The system library takes around 10MB. Thats a fairly large library at the application developer's disposal. Memory is saved via minimal repetition, per-type pools, and implicit labeling. Zygote is a pre-initialized process + pre-warmed Dalvik VM. This ensures responsiveness. When requested, it forks and returns the new process. The advantage is that the application shares the API classes in memory so that the memory foot print is less. Android manages multiple processes which have separate heaps, and separate GCs. When an application is installed, it is verified so that it does not violate the constriants of the system. The application is also optimized( static linking, inlining some native methods etc) so that when the application is run, it runs faster. Oh btw: the Dalvik is not a stack based machine but it is a register based machine. Theoretically, it is defined to be an infinite register machine. This results in fewer instructions to perform operations.

Inside the Android Application Framework:

Lifecycle:
Android provides a lot of hooks for application developers to plug-in custom code during the lifecycle. In my APIs, I try to give my developers a powerful yet simple looking APIs. Granted it is a tricky decision to make, but it is all about drawing a line and finalizing on the API. The Android lifecycle hooks are pretty complex and remind you of EJB lifecycle. Hopefully, a lot of developers will not get confused with differences between methods like onCreate(), onStart() and onStop(), onDestroy()

Threads:
Each process has a thread. Each thread has a Looper which handles a message queue. Any events are posted to this message queue. And, are processed by the thread through the Looper. Loopers cannot accommodate multi-threaded access. Loopers support a message handler to handle multi-threaded access. Looper also handles calling local service calls. Local services are ones defined in the same process.

Processes:
Each process is given it's own user ID. The only processes that run as root as Zygot, runtime, and init. A process has Intents, Services, and ContentProviders among other things. A Service is used to expose some functionality to other applications. To expose data, a ContentProvider is used.