Book Image

Java 9 Concurrency Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Javier Fernández González
Book Image

Java 9 Concurrency Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Javier Fernández González

Overview of this book

Writing concurrent and parallel programming applications is an integral skill for any Java programmer. Java 9 comes with a host of fantastic features, including significant performance improvements and new APIs. This book will take you through all the new APIs, showing you how to build parallel and multi-threaded applications. The book covers all the elements of the Java Concurrency API, with essential recipes that will help you take advantage of the exciting new capabilities. You will learn how to use parallel and reactive streams to process massive data sets. Next, you will move on to create streams and use all their intermediate and terminal operations to process big collections of data in a parallel and functional way. Further, you’ll discover a whole range of recipes for almost everything, such as thread management, synchronization, executors, parallel and reactive streams, and many more. At the end of the book, you will learn how to obtain information about the status of some of the most useful components of the Java Concurrency API and how to test concurrent applications using different tools.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Using atomic arrays

Consider that you need to implement a concurrent application that has one or more objects shared by several threads. In such a scenario, you have to protect access to their attributes using a synchronization mechanism, such as locks or the synchronized keyword, to avoid data inconsistency errors.

These mechanisms have the following problems:

  • Deadlock: This situation occurs when a thread is blocked waiting for a lock that is locked by other threads that will never free it. This situation blocks the program, so it will never finish.
  • If only one thread is accessing the shared object, it has to execute the code necessary to get and release the lock.

To provide better performance in this situation, the compare-and-swap operation was developed. This operation implements the modification of the value of a variable in the following three steps:

  1. You get the value of the variable, which is the old value...