Java™ How To Program (Early Objects), Tenth Edition

Concurrent Programming Uses

We’ll discuss many applications of concurrent programming. For example, when streaming an audio or video over the Internet, the user may not want to wait until the entire audio or video downloads before starting the playback. To solve this problem, multiple threads can be used—one to download the audio or video (later in the chapter we’ll refer to this as a producer), and another to play it (later in the chapter we’ll refer to this as a consumer). These activities proceed concurrently. To avoid choppy playback, the threads are synchronized (that is, their actions are coordinated) so that the player thread doesn’t begin until there’s a sufficient amount of the audio or video in memory to keep the player thread busy. ...