Book Image

Mastering Concurrency Programming with Java 9 - Second Edition

By : Javier Fernández González
Book Image

Mastering Concurrency Programming with Java 9 - Second Edition

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. Java 9 includes a comprehensive API with lots of ready-to-use components for easily implementing powerful concurrency applications, but with high flexibility so you can adapt these components to your needs. The book starts with a full description of the design principles of concurrent applications and explains how to parallelize a sequential algorithm. You will then be introduced to Threads and Runnables, which are an integral part of Java 9's concurrency API. You will see how to use all the components of the Java concurrency API, from the basics to the most advanced techniques, and will implement them in powerful real-world concurrency applications. The book ends with a detailed description of the tools and techniques you can use to test a concurrent Java application, along with a brief insight into other concurrency mechanisms in JVM.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface

Summary


In this chapter, we have presented the most basic elements to create execution threads in Java: the Runnable interface and the Thread class. We can create threads in Java in two different ways:

  • Extending the Thread class and overriding the run() method
  • Implementing the Runnable interface and passing an object of that class to the constructor of the Thread class

The second mechanism is preferred over the first one because they give us more flexibility.

We also learned how the Thread class has different methods that allow us to get information about the thread, change its priority, or wait for its finalization. We have used all these methods in two examples, one to multiply matrices and the other to search files in a directory. In both cases, concurrency gives us better performance but we also have learned that we have to be careful when implementing a concurrent version of an algorithm. A bad selection for how we use concurrency can give us bad performance.

In the next chapter, we will...