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)

Synchronizing a block of code with a lock

Java provides another mechanism for synchronizing blocks of code. It's a more powerful and flexible mechanism than the synchronized keyword. It's based on the Lock (of the java.util.concurrent.locks package) interface and classes that implement it (as ReentrantLock). This mechanism presents some advantages, which are as follows:

  • It allows you to structure synchronized blocks in a more flexible way. With the synchronized keyword, you only have control over a synchronized block of code in a structured way. However, the Lock interface allows you to get more complex structures to implement your critical section.
  • The Lock interface provides additional functionalities over the synchronized keyword. One of the new functionalities is implemented by the tryLock() method. This method tries to get control of the lock, and if it can't, because it's used by another...