Android REST API with RetroFit

Question

My question is kinda theorical, hope I can get a clear explanation on this. I've been looking for a nice rest api consumer for android (or some clear info on how to develop a solid one) and I found the rest api design talk from google IO 2010.

"Developing Android REST Client Applications - Google"

It's been 4 since this talk and I think there might exitst new designs and techniques for this matter, or not ? The scenario that I think that would work the best for me is this one:

So my first question is, does this architecture is still valid for a new app (Starting from the beginning) ? I've found Retrofit, which seems a pretty nice and stable Api for the rest service, but I can't quite understand how it works, like if it is a good approach to call my api endpoints from activities (or frags) and the library handles the resume/pause (delivering results when activity is on hold, or not) or I must implement this myself.

Sorry for the long post and thanks for the patience !

Answer 1

You must implement how to handle that yourself, to answer your question. Yes, that architecture is valid, but RetroFit only forms part of the "Rest Method" block. How would you implement it? That depend on what you want. You could use Retrofit (AKA the REST Method) inside the service, and that would be ok, however you can also skip using services and use it inside of an activity or fragment. However if you do the second option(activities/fragments) you can not think in handling the activity life cycle within retrofit(onStart, onPause, etc..) because since these are network calls, you must perform them on worker threads(AsyncTasks for instance).

So in conclusion, whatever option you decide, being Services or worker threads, you must think in using perhaps observers to control your activity/fragment, and remember that requesting network data is always done out of the ui thread. Implementations of how to handle the situation may be done by you depending on your needs and complexity of the application.