While we lamented how feature-poor Java 7 turned out to be, one thing that made it that turns out to be a boon to high-performance concurrent development is the new Fork/Join framework. This framework is targeted at multi-processor systems (really almost all hardware today) in situations where a batch of work can broken into smaller … Read more
Some concurrency utilities in Java naturally get more attention than others just because they serve general purpose problems instead of more specific ones. Most of us encounter things like executor services and concurrent collections fairly often. Other utilities are less common, so sometimes they may escape us, but it’s good to keep them in mind. … Read more
Java has boasted various collections classes for many years now, all to deal with common programming problems. When we need synchronized collections, we used to just wrap our regular collections with a call to java.util.Collections.synchronizedList() or the other similar methods. Sometimes though, these methods don’t scale as they are a very primitive and unoptimized way … Read more
As discussed in Part 3, the thread pools introduced in Java 1.5 provided core support that was quickly a favourite of many java developers. Internally, the implementations make smart use of another concurrency feature introduced in java 1.5 – Blocking Queues. Queue First, a brief review of what a standard queue is. In computer science, … Read more
One of the beautiful things about Java from its very first release was the ease with which we could write multi-threaded programs and introduce asynchronous processing into our designs. The Thread class and Runnable interface combined with Java’s memory management model meant for straightforward thread programming. But as discussed in Part 3, neither the Thread … Read more
One of the most generally useful concurrency enhancements delivered in Java 1.5 was the introduction of customizable thread pools. These thread pools give you quite a bit of control over things such as number of threads, reuse of threads, scheduling and thread construction. Let’s review these. First, thread pools. Let’s dive right into java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService, which … Read more
Java’s synchronized keyword is a wonderful tool – it allows us a simple and reliable way to synchronize access to critical sections and it’s not too hard to understand. But sometimes we need more control over synchronization. Either we need to control types of access (read and write) separately, or it is cumbersome to use … Read more
This is the first part in a series that we’re going to be doing on Java concurrency. Specifically, we are going to dive into the concurrency tools built into Java 1.5 and beyond. We’re going to assume you have a basic understanding of synchronization and volatile keywords. The first post will cover semaphores - specifically counting semaphores. … Read more