Concurrent Programming in Java™: Design Principles and Patterns, Second Edition

Chapter 4. Creating Threads

It is impossible to categorize all the ways to exploit the functionality associated with threads. But two general approaches can be distinguished by their points of view on the statement:

new Thread(aRunnable).start();

Is this a fancy way to invoke a method (i.e., a Runnable's run method), or is it a way to create a fancy object (i.e., a new instance of class Thread)? Clearly it is both, but focusing on one aspect versus the other leads to two approaches to using threads that were implicit in discussions in Chapter 1:

Task-based. Here, the main reason to use a thread is to asynchronously invoke a method that performs some task. The task might range from a single method to an entire session. Thread-based techniques can ...