I am implementing an app in Flutter, for which I need to schedule (audio) events in advance. Only after one event is completed I can schedule the next, since the duration of the event might not be known before. Each audio event is a notification sound for the user, thus scheduling and audio playback should both work while the app has no focus or the phone is locked.
I currently fail to implement these specifications and I guess I'm just not thinking the right way about it for the moment. Since I started to learn Flutter recently, there could also be just some simple misunderstandings from my part. Let me summarize what I know about background execution & native code in Flutter, please correct anything wrong with these statements:
When the App looses focus (or the phone gets locked) code execution stops.
However, inside the "primary" Dart-code, I can spawn an isolate which will run even with the phone locked or without focus on the app.
Different isolates share no memory whatsoever; they communicate via ports.
There a spawned isolate does not know anything about the flutter ecosystem, therefore it is not possible to use flutter plugins.
For the same reasons I cannot use MethodChannels as well to communicate with platform code from an isolate.
From this I conclude:
The event should be scheduled from a seperate Dart-isolate, so that locking the phone won't halt scheduling.
This isolate won't be able to play any audio file by itself, and won't be able to communicate with platform code.
Thus, it needs to communicate with the primary isolate, which can play audio. However, without the app open, the code won't respond.
Consequently, this approach cannot work?
Right now, I am stuck at this point and don't know how to continue. I guess one option could be to directly call java/swift code for the respective native platforms and handle scheduling and audio there. Yet, I hope that I just don't see a simpler option right now.
Related
My clien app is base on Electron so basically it's make of web tech.
Because I want to open two MediaRecorders one for capture desktop screen and another for camera.
I provide a very simple example as follow. When I only use single MediaRecorder everything is work fine.
Then when I start to use both, some computers will get broken video occasionally during stop recording process or after reset few times.
Especially when computer is runing busy or situation that memory only left few but not really insufficient memory.
Example in Github
I try to use two invisible browser window(In Electron) and save in file each second to fix this problem but it's not fix the problem completely (Though it's getting better).
Another problem is I try to use fs.createWriteStream and fs.write with dataavailable event in Electron
but dataavailable event is not trigger everytime if I use slice time in recorder.start(1000) method.
The dataavailable problem will occur sometimes.
Is any suggestion for this requirements
I'm in the process of designing an application that will run on a headless Windows CE 6.0 device. The idea is to make an application that will be started at startup and run until powered off. (Basically it will look like a service, but an application is easier to debug without the complete hassle to stop/deploy/start/attach to process procedure)
My concern is what will happen during development. If I debug/deploy the application I see no way of closing it in a friendly and easy way. (Feel free to suggest if this can be done in a better/user friendly way) I will just stop the debugger and the result will be WSACleanup is not called.
Now, the question. What is the consequence of not calling WSACleanup? Will I be able to start and run the winsock application again using the debugger? Or will there be a resource leak preventing me to do so?
Thanks in advance,
Jef
I think that Harry Johnston comment is correct.
Even if your application has no UI you can find a way to close it gracefully. I suppose that you have one or more threads in loops, you can add a named manual reset event that is checked (or can be used for waits instead of Sleep()) inside the loop condition and build a small application that opens the event using the same name, sets it and quits. This would force also your service app to close.
It may not be needed for debugging, but it may be useful also if you'll need to update your software and this requires that your main service is not running.
I am new to mobile website development, and facing this issue where I want to refresh data on the website in every 30 sec which is invoked from the client side and server provides the data in response. Problem is when I close the browser or when the browser goes in background it stops working. Is there any thing we can do to make this thing possible?
Have a look at the Android Developers - Processes and Threads guide. You'll get a deeper introduction to how process life-cycles work and what the difference is between the states for background- and foreground processes.
You could embed your web app in a WebView. This way you could deal with the closing browser case: you could provide a means to "exit" the app that involves closing only your container activity. That way the timers you have registered in javascript will still be running in the 'WebViewCoreThread'. This is an undesirable behavior and a source of problems, but you can take advantage of it if you want (just make sure you don't run UI-related code there). I've never tested this in Kit Kat (which uses a different WebView based on Chrome) but works for previous versions, as I described here.
Now the user can always close any app. Even without user interaction, the OS can kill your app on low memory. So just give up on long-running apps that never end, because the OS is designed in such a way this is simply not possible.
You could go native and schedule Alarms using the AlarmManager.
Just checked this out on the Android KitKat WebView and as per Mister Smith's comments the javascript will continue executing in the background until the Activity is killed off:
Just tested with this running in a WebView:
http://jsbin.com/EwEjIyaY/3/edit
My gut instinct is that if the user has moved your application into the background, there seems little value in performing updates every 30 seconds, it makes more sense to just start updating again once the user opens the device up and cache what information you currently have available to you.
As far as Chrome for Android goes the same is happening, as Chrome falls into the background the javascript is still running.
If you are experiencing different behaviour then what exactly are you seeing and can you give us an example?
We are having a web application build using asp.net 3.5 & SQL server as database which is quite big and used by around 300 super users for managing around 5000 staffs.
Now we are implementing SMS functionality into the application which means the users will be able to send and receive SMS. Every two minute the SMS server of the third party is pinged to check whether there are any new messages. Also SMS are hold in queue and send every time interval of 15 to 30 minutes.
I want this checking and sending process to run in the background of the application all the time, even if the user closes the browser window.
I need some advice on how do I do this?
Will using thread will achieve this or do I need to create a windows service for it or are there any other options?
More information:
I want to execute a task in a timer, what will happen if I close the browser window, the task wont be completed isn't it so.
For example I am saving 10 records to the database in a time interval of 5 minutes, which means every 5 minutes when the timer tick event fires, a record is inserted into the database.
How do I run this task if I close the browser window?
I tried looking at windows service but how do I pass a generic collection of data to it for processing.
There really is no thread or service choice, a service can (and usually is!) multi threaded, a thread can start a service.
There are three basic choices you can:-
Somehow start another thread running when a user logs in -- this is probably a very poor choice for what you want, as you cannot really keep it running once the user session is lost.
Write a fully fledged windows service which is starts on OS startup and continues running unitl the server is shutdown. You can make this dependant on the SQLserver service, so it starts after the DB is available. This is the "best" solution but may be overkill for your purposes. Aslo you need to know the services API to write it properly as you need to respond correctly to shutdown and status requests.
You can schedule your task periodically using either the Windows schedular, or, preferably the schedular which is built in to SQLServer, I think this would be the most suitable option for your needs.
Distinguish between what the browser is doing and what's happening server-side.
Your Web App is sitting server-side waiting for requests from whatever browsers may be running, and servicing those requests, in servicing those requests I guess it may well put messages on a queue and have a look in a database for any new messages.
You want the daemon processor, which talks to the third-party SMS, to be triggered by time rather than by browser function. Either of your suggestions would work:
A competely independent service could run and work against the queues and database.
Your web app, which I assume is already a service, could spawn a thread
In either case we have a few technical questions of avoiding any race conditions between the browser-request processing and the daemon - but databases and queueing systems can deal with that.
So I would decide between stand-alone daemon and background thread like this:
Which is easier to implement? I'm a Java EE developer, I know in my app server I have an API for specifying code to be run according to a timer, the API deals with the threading issues. So for me that's very easy. I don't know what you have available. Timers are not quite as trivial as they may appear - so having a reliable API is beneficial. If this was a more complex requirement, where the daemon code were gnarly and might possibly interfere with the WebApp code then I might prefer to keep it conspicuously separate.
Which is easier to deploy and administer? Deploy separate Web App and daemon, or deploy one thing. In the Java EE world we could have a single Enterprise Application with all the code, so that's a single thing to deploy, start and control.
One other thing to consider: Scaling and Resilience. You might choose to have more than one copy of your web app running, either to provide fail-over capabilities or just because you need the extra power. In which case how many daemons would you have? Would it be a problem to have two daemons running? You might need some extra code to mediate between two daemons, for example log in the database the time of last work, each daemon can say "Oh, my buddy balready did the 10:30 job, I'll go back to sleep"
Even with a poor network connection?
Specifically, I've written code which launches a separate thread (from the UI) that attempts to upload a file via HTTP POST. I've found, however, that if the connection is bad, the processor gets stuck on outputstream.close() or httpconnection.getheaderfield() or any read/write which forces data over the network. This causes not only the thread to get stuck, but steals the entire processor, so even the user interface becomes unresponsive.
I've tried lowering the priority of the thread, to no avail.
My theory is that there is no easy way of avoiding this behavior, which is why all the j2me tutorial instruct developers to create a ‘sending data over the network…’ screen, instead of just sending everything in a background thread. If someone can prove me wrong, that would be fantastic.
Thanks!
One important aspect is you need to have a generic UI or screen that can be displayed when the network call in background fails. It is pretty much a must on any mobile app, J2ME or otherwise.
As Honza said, it depends on the design, there are so many things that can be done, like pre-fetching data on app startup, or pre-fetching data based on the screen that is loaded (i.e navigation path), or having a default data set built in into the app etc.
Another thing that you can try is a built-in timer mechanism that retries data download after certain amount of time, and aborting after say 5 tries or 1-2 minutes and displaying generic screen or error message.
Certain handsets in J2ME allow detection of airplane mode, if possible you can detect that and promptly display an appropriate screen.
Also one design that has worked for me is synchronizing UI and networking threads, so that they dont lock up each other (take this bit of advice with heavy dose of salt as I have had quite a few interesting bugs on some samsung and sanyo handsets because of this)
All in all no good answer for you, but different strategies.
It pretty much depends on how you write the code and where you run it. On CLDC the concept of threading is pretty limited and if any thread is doing some long lasting operation other threads might be (and usualy are) blocked by it as well. You should take that into account when designing your application.
You can divide your file data into chunks and then upload with multiple retries on failure. This depends on your application strategy . If your priority is to upload a bulk data with out failure. You need to have assemble the chunks on server to build back your data . This may have the overhead for making connections but the chance is high for your data will get uploaded . If you are not uploading files concurrently this will work with ease .