Java Cookbook

Chapter 24. Threaded Java

Introduction

We live in a world of multiple activities. A person may be talking on the phone while doodling or reading a memo. A FAX machine may scan one FAX while receiving another and printing a third. We expect the GUI programs we use to be able to respond to a menu while updating the screen. But ordinary computer programs can do only one thing at a time. The conventional computer programming model -- that of writing one statement after another, punctuated by repetitive loops and binary decision-making -- is sequential at heart.

Sequential processing is straightforward, but not as efficient as it could be. To enhance performance, Java offers threading, the capability to handle multiple flows of control within a single application or process. Java provides thread support and, in fact, requires threads: the Java runtime itself is inherently multithreaded. For example, Windows system action handling and Java’s garbage collection -- that miracle that lets us avoid having to free everything we allocate, as we must do when working in languages at or below C level -- run in separate threads.

While most modern operating systems -- POSIX P1003, Sun Solaris, the Distributed Computing Environment (OSF/DCE) for Unix, Windows NT/95, and MacOS -- provide threads, Java is the first mainstream programming language to have intrinsic support for threaded operations built right into the language. The semantics of java.lang.Object, of which all objects are instances, includes ...