Since activities are the things that interact with the user, they are
the
only things that can directly show UI.
The Application class exists because my arms were twisted into making
it.
There is nothing actually all that useful about it, as far as I am
concerned. ;)

We have several proxy interfaces where we make calls to backend
services -- I thought a specialized extension of Application would be
useful to hold these proxies as well as a client interface where we
make the call, to reduce the number of objects being created and
cutting down on Garbage Collection.  A singleton if you will.  Is this
an erroneous assumption?

I also was using the Application as a location to fire off a thread to
load globally accessible data needed by the application -- should I
move these into an Activity and store the data in the sqllite?  It
seems like a lot more work to store them in a database if I'm just
going to query them the next time the app pulls them down.  I plan to
write a mechanism to sync the data to local sqllite in the future, I'm
just short on time.

I'm currently running into a problem where I'm getting an NPE back
from a subsequent activity where this data is not found--even though I
saw it being loaded in my Application subclass and stored there.
Weird.

Brian

I generally recommend just doing singletons in statics rather than making a
custom Application class.  To me it seems easier, and avoids issues in the
future when you are breaking an app apart or combining apps together or
other kinds of refactoring where having a bunch of stuff in a global
Application class gets annoying.

Also using static singletons tends to encourage people more to do lazy
initialization, rather initializating a bunch of stuff when an Application
class is created which can significantly impact startup time.

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 10:47 AM, bkbonner <brian.bon...@paraware.com>wrote:

Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to
provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails.  All such
questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and
answer them.