Glide, an Android media loading library...

Recently I have came across new image loader library Glide from iosched Git Code

Glide

Glide is a fast and efficient open source media management framework for Android that wraps media decoding, memory and disk caching, and resource pooling into a simple and easy to use interface.

Glide's primary focus is on making scrolling any kind of a list of images as smooth and fast as possible, but Glide is also effective for almost any case where you need to fetch, resize, and display a remote image.

Implementation / Usage

When we see the implementation of Glide. It looks similar to the Picasso.

Let Looks the implementation of Picasso and Glide.

Picasso.with(this).load("http://i.imgur.com/DvpvklR.png").into(imageView);

Glide.with(this).load("http://i.imgur.com/DvpvklR.png").into(imageView);

Using the Picasso or Glide are easy and straight forward.

Advantage of Glide here is... Inbuilt it supports caching...

Let us assume, I am having two ImageView where one is loaded with Picasso and othere with Glide as shown below.

 // Picasso  
 ImageView imageView = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.imageView1);  
 imageView.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() {  
      @Override  
      public void onClick(View v) {  
           Log.d(TAG, "Image 1");  
      }  
 });  
 Picasso.with(this).load("http://i.imgur.com/DvpvklR.png").into(imageView);  

 // Glide  
 ImageView imageView2 = (ImageView) findViewById(R.id.imageView2);  
 imageView2.setOnClickListener(new OnClickListener() {  
      @Override  
      public void onClick(View v) {  
           Log.d(TAG, "Image 2");  
      }  
 });  
 Glide.with(this).load("http://i.imgur.com/DvpvklR.png").into(imageView2);  

Run the application by connecting to the internet, We can see downloading the images repsectively.

Know turn off internet connection and kill the application from recent apps and now launch application we can see the imageview2(Glide) is loaded but not imageview1 (Picasso).

New Features

Glide version 3.x supports large number of features...

• Animated GIF decoding
• Local video stills
• Thumbnail support
• Lifecycle integration
• Transcoding
• Animations
• OkHttp and Volley Support

Including the ability to use Drawables objects as placeholders during loads, request prioritization, width and height overrides and the ability to cache transformed thumbnails and/or the original source.

By default Glide uses a custom HttpUrlConnection based stack, but also includes utility libraries plug in to Google's Volley project or Square's OkHttp library instead.

In addition to the new features introduced in the the 3.x version, Glide carries over all of the originals from the 2.x version:

• Background image loading.
• Automatic job cancellation in lists where views are re-used.
• Memory and disk caching
• Bitmap and resource pooling to minimize jank.
• Arbitrary transformations.

There are pros and cons in any library and I am not supporting any of the tool/library here.

Thanks for reading :) 

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