PagerAdapter is more general than the adapters used for AdapterViews. Instead of providing a View recycling mechanism directly ViewPager uses callbacks to indicate the steps taken during an update. A PagerAdapter may implement a form of View recycling if desired or use a more sophisticated method of managing page Views such as Fragment transactions where each page is represented by its own Fragment.

As PagerAdapter does not handle view recycling, I tried to make one with an android.widget.Adapter like interface: getCount(), getItem(int position), and getView(Object object, View convertView, ViewGroup parent).

The code is on github https://gist.github.com/4551304.

The view-data binding is queued until finishUpdate instead of getting done in instantiateItem. So no matter destoryItem is called before instantiateItem or not (swiping direction will cause different calling orders), we always have a chance to try recycling the detached views.