Core Java® Volume I—Fundamentals, Tenth Edition

14.6 Blocking Queues

You have now seen the low-level building blocks that form the foundations of concurrent programming in Java. However, for practical programming, you want to stay away from the low-level constructs whenever possible. It is much easier and safer to use higher-level structures that have been implemented by concurrency experts.

Many threading problems can be formulated elegantly and safely by using one or more queues. Producer threads insert items into the queue, and consumer threads retrieve them. The queue lets you safely hand over data from one thread to another. For example, consider our bank transfer program. Instead of accessing the bank object directly, the transfer threads insert transfer instruction objects into a ...