CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidipcandroid-contentprovideraidl
Binabik
Binabik

Reputation: 1073

ContentProvider vs. using AIDL/Messenger

I want to develop an application that supports plugins and that provides data to these plugins. It seems to me that the correct way to implement this plugin-archtitecture on Android would be one apk for the main app and one apk per plugin.

But as the main app and every plugin are in different apks I can't easily pass (data) objects from the one to the other, the applications run in different processes and even if they run in one process (which can be achieved) they have different classloaders and this doesn't work. Currently I see two promising approaches for getting data from my main app to my plugins:

  1. Declaring the main app as a ContentProvider. This seems to me to be the intended approach because it does exactly what I want to achieve: providing content/data to another process.
  2. Making my data objects Parcelable and pushing them around with AIDL or - if I do not need multithreading - with the Messenger-approach. In my opinion, this approach seems to be easier because I can use an ORM-library which cares about the Database in the background. I never used ContentProviders before but at a first look at it I thought that using a ContentProvider is a bit like building SQL-Queries by hand (please tell me if I'm wrong), and I would like to avoid that work!

Now I would like to know if I missed any pros or cons and if there are notable performance differences between these two approaches. And which solution would you prefer and why would you do so?

Thanks in advance! Any replies are appreciated!

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3740

Answers (1)

Yury
Yury

Reputation: 20936

Content provider is just way to share data (that are stored in different ways [database, files and so on]) between applications. If you want just share data between application it is the best way to do this.

However, if you want services to perform some tasks with data (for instance, sum several values provided by you) it's better to have a remote service.

In general case, application - plugin interaction is more similar to a remote service. In this case the main application exposes a remote service (an API of this application) that can be used by plugins to perform some actions.

Upvotes: 6

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