Concurrency: State Models and Java Programs

Chapter 5. Monitors and Condition Synchronization

Monitors are language features for concurrent programming. A monitor encapsulates data, which can only be observed and modified by monitor access procedures. Only a single access procedure may be active at a time. An access procedure thus has mutually exclusive access to the data variables encapsulated in the monitor. Monitors should sound familiar since we have already seen the monitor concept in the last chapter, though explained using different terminology. An object satisfies the data access requirement of a monitor since it encapsulates data which, if declared private, can be accessed only by the object's methods. These methods can be synchronized to provide mutually exclusive access. Thus, a monitor is simply represented in Java as a class that has synchronized methods.

Monitors support condition synchronization in addition to ensuring that access to the data they encapsulate is mutually exclusive. Condition synchronization, as the term suggests, permits a monitor to block threads until a particular condition holds, such as a count becoming non-zero, a buffer becoming empty or new input becoming available. This chapter describes how condition synchronization in monitors is modeled and how it is implemented in Java.

Condition Synchronization

We illustrate condition synchronization using a simple example. A controller is required for a car park, which only permits cars to enter when the car park is not full and, for consistency, ...