What are the IPC mechanisms available in the Android OS?

android android-intent ipc android-bundle android-binder
Suman picture Suman · Apr 21, 2011 · Viewed 74.1k times · Source

Will any one please tell me what are all the IPC mechanisms that are present in Android.

To my knowledge are:

  1. Intents
  2. Binders

Answer

Vladimir Ivanov picture Vladimir Ivanov · Apr 21, 2011

IPC is inter-process communication. It describes the mechanisms used by different types of android components to communicate with one another.

1) Intents are messages which components can send and receive. It is a universal mechanism of passing data between processes. With help of the intents one can start services or activities, invoke broadcast receivers and so on.

2) Bundles are entities of data that is passed through. It is similar to the serialization of an object, but much faster on android. Bundle can be read from intent via the getExtras() method.

3) Binders are the entities which allow activities and services to obtain a reference to another service. It allows not simply sending messages to services but directly invoking methods on them.

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