Android - Restful API service

I'm looking to make a service which I can use to make calls to a web based rest api. I've spent a couple of days looking through stackoverflow.com, reading books and looking at articles whilst playing about with some code and I can't get anything which I'm happy with.

Basically I want to start a service on app init then I want to be able to ask that service to request a url and return the results. In the meantime I want to be able to display a progress window or something similar.

I've created a service currently which uses IDL, I've read somewhere that you only really need this for cross app communication, so think these needs stripping out but unsure how to do callbacks without it. Also when I hit the post(Config.getURL("login"), values) the app seems to pause for a while (seems weird - thought the idea behind a service was that it runs on a different thread!)

Currently I have a service with post and get http methods inside, a couple of AIDL files (for two way communication), a ServiceManager which deals with starting, stopping, binding etc to the service and I'm dynamically creating a Handler with specific code for the callbacks as needed.

I don't want anyone to give me a complete code base to work on, but some pointers would be greatly appreciated; even if it's to say I'm doing it completely wrong. I'm pretty new to Android and Java dev so if there are any blindingly obvious mistakes here - please don't think I'm a rubbish developer, I'm just wet behind the ears and would appreciate being told where I'm going wrong.

Anyway, code in (mostly) full (really didn't want to put this much code here, but I don't know where I'm going wrong - apologies in advance):

[CODE] .....

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