Java™ How to Program, Seventh Edition

23.6. Producer/Consumer Relationship without Synchronization

In a producer/consumer relationship, the producer portion of an application generates data and stores it in a shared object, and the consumer portion of an application reads data from the shared object. The producer/consumer relationship separates the task of identifying work to be done from the tasks involved in actually carrying out the work. One example of a common producer/consumer relationship is print spooling. Although a printer might not be available when you want to print from an application (i.e., the producer), you can still “complete” the print task, as the data is temporarily placed on disk until the printer becomes available. Similarly, when the printer (i.e., a consumer) ...