Book Image

Mastering Concurrency Programming with Java 8

By : Javier Fernández González
Book Image

Mastering Concurrency Programming with Java 8

By: Javier Fernández González

Overview of this book

Concurrency programming allows several large tasks to be divided into smaller sub-tasks, which are further processed as individual tasks that run in parallel. All the sub-tasks are combined together once the required results are achieved; they are then merged to get the final output. The whole process is very complex. This process goes from the design of concurrent algorithms to the testing phase where concurrent applications need extra attention. Java includes a comprehensive API with a lot of ready-to-use components to implement powerful concurrency applications in an easy way, but with a high flexibility to adapt these components to your needs. The book starts with a full description of design principles of concurrent applications and how to parallelize a sequential algorithm. We'll show you how to use all the components of the Java Concurrency API from basics to the most advanced techniques to implement them in powerful concurrency applications in Java. You will be using real-world examples of complex algorithms related to machine learning, data mining, natural language processing, image processing in client / server environments. Next, you will learn how to use the most important components of the Java 8 Concurrency API: the Executor framework to execute multiple tasks in your applications, the phaser class to implement concurrent tasks divided into phases, and the Fork/Join framework to implement concurrent tasks that can be split into smaller problems (using the divide and conquer technique). Toward the end, we will cover the new inclusions in Java 8 API, the Map and Reduce model, and the Map and Collect model. The book will also teach you about the data structures and synchronization utilities to avoid data-race conditions and other critical problems. Finally, the book ends with a detailed description of the tools and techniques that you can use to test a Java concurrent application.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering Concurrency Programming with Java 8
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Implementation of alternatives with concurrent programming


Most of the examples we have implemented through the chapters of this book can be implemented using other components of the Java concurrency API. In this section, we will describe how to implement some of these alternatives.

The k-nearest neighbors' algorithm

You have implemented the k-nearest neighbors' algorithm in Chapter 2, Managing Lots of Threads – Executors, using an executor. This is a simple machine-learning algorithm used for supervised classification. You have a training set of previous classified examples. To obtain the class of a new example, you calculate the distance from this example to the training set of examples. The majority of classes in the nearest examples are the classes selected for the example. You can also implement this algorithm with one of the following components of the concurrency API:

  • Threads: You can implement this example using Thread objects. You have to execute the tasks executed in the executor...