Java Threads, Second Edition

Thread Interruption

The wait() method—like the sleep() and join() methods that we examined in Section 2.1—may under certain circumstances throw an InterruptedException. These methods all throw such an exception when the thread in which they are executing is interrupted, which occurs when another thread calls this method:

void interrupt() ( Java 1.1 and above only)

Sends an interruption to the specified thread. If the thread is currently blocked in a thread-related method (i.e., the sleep(), join(), or wait() methods), the thread moves to an unblocked state; otherwise, a boolean flag is simply set to indicate that the thread has been interrupted.

Thread Interruption in Java 1.0

If you happen to have Java 1.0, you’ll find that the various interrupt-related methods that we’re describing in this section do not function: they all simply throw a NoSuchMethodError.

In Java 1.0.2—and browsers such as Netscape 3.0 and Internet Explorer 3.0 that are based on that release—these methods do not work properly. In particular, the interrupt() method is not able to interrupt a thread that is sleeping. While you can use the isInterrupted() method to determine if the interrupt() method has been called, the 1.0.2 implementation of these methods does not help you to deal with blocked threads.

Thread interruption works in Java 1.1 and later releases, but it does not work in many 1.1-based browsers. For now, we recommend that you use these methods only in Java applications or in applets run with the Java ...