Book Image

Java 9: Building Robust Modular Applications

By : Dr. Edward Lavieri, Peter Verhas, Jason Lee
Book Image

Java 9: Building Robust Modular Applications

By: Dr. Edward Lavieri, Peter Verhas, Jason Lee

Overview of this book

Java 9 and its new features add to the richness of the language; Java is one of the languages most used by developers to build robust software applications. Java 9 comes with a special emphasis on modularity with its integration with Jigsaw. This course is your one-stop guide to mastering the language. You'll be provided with an overview and explanation of the new features introduced in Java 9 and the importance of the new APIs and enhancements. Some new features of Java 9 are ground-breaking; if you are an experienced programmer, you will be able to make your enterprise applications leaner by learning these new features. You'll be provided with practical guidance in applying your newly acquired knowledge of Java 9 and further information on future developments of the Java platform. This course will improve your productivity, making your applications faster. Next, you'll go on to implement everything you've learned by building 10 cool projects. You will learn to build an email filter that separates spam messages from all your inboxes, a social media aggregator app that will help you efficiently track various feeds, and a microservice for a client/server note application, to name just a few. By the end of this course, you will be well acquainted with Java 9 features and able to build your own applications and projects. This Learning Path contains the best content from the following two recently published Packt products: • Mastering Java 9 • Java 9 Programming Blueprints
Table of Contents (33 chapters)
Title Page - Courses
Packt Upsell - Courses
Preface
25
Taking Notes with Monumentum
Bibliography
Index

Updating the process list


If the application started and showed a list of processes, but never updated that list, it wouldn't be very useful at all. What we then need is a way to update the list periodically, and for that, we'll use a Thread.

As you may or may not know, a Thread is roughly a means to run a task in the background (the Javadoc describes it as a thread of execution in a program). A system can be single or multithreaded, depending on the needs and runtime environment of the system. And multithreaded programming is hard to get right. Luckily, our use case here is fairly simple, but we must still exercise caution, or we'll see some really unexpected behavior.

Ordinarily, the advice you would get when creating a Thread is to implement a Runnable interface, which you will then pass to the thread's constructor, and that's very good advice, as it makes your class hierarchy much more flexible, since you're not tied to a concrete base class (Runnable is an interface). In our case, however...