Eric Burke: Java Concurrency By Example

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 14:15:13 GMT

We had an outstanding presentation at the St. Louis JUG yesterday evening. Eric Burke, of the It's Just a Bunch of Stuff That Happens fame, gave a presentation on some of the new Java 5 and 6 concurrency features, through a series of examples. Like in the past, this is another one of those "you have to be there to experience it" presentations.

Here's what I learned from this presentation:

The Java Concurrency in Practice book, by Brian Goetz, with Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes, and Doug Lea, is a must read for anyone developing Java applications on a modern Java platform.

Have you written something like this

try {
  Thread.sleep(1000);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
  // ignored
}

This is completely wrong.

i++ is not atomic.
The new concurrency utilities package in Java 5 and 6 is very rich. It's worth studying in depth.
TimeUnit
CopyOnWriteArraySet
Use a ThreadFactory to create threads and give them proper names instead of the default "Thread-1", "Thread-2" and register UncaughtExceptionHandler's.
Executor, Future
Lock, tryLock(), lockInterruptibly()
ReadWriteLock
BlockingQueue

Here's how a thread should be written

new Thread() {
  public void run() {
    while (!Thread.currentThread().isInterrupted()) {
      // do the work...
    }
  }
}

At the meta level, I think the lesson is there are so much stuff that's new in Java 5, that it's worth learning it anew.

On a different topic in the post presentation chats, Eric mentioned that the latest Java 6 have many improvements over Java 5. And if you are upgrading from Java 1.4, you might as well skip Java 5 and jump directly to Java 6

I Need To Get That Book!

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 04:14:46 GMT

Bryan Young: I've only made it halfway through, and I feel like the little kid in 'The Sixth Sense' -- I see bugs everywhere.

Bryan is talking about Brian Goetz's new book Java Concurrency in Practice. I have read many of Brian Goetz's columns in various web sites and have always learned something from each article.

I also heard Brian Coyner say that the book is worth a read.

I'm going to get a copy of the book tomorrow.

The Problem With Threads

Tue, 16 May 2006 12:15:32 GMT

(Via Lambda the Ultimate.)

Edward A. Lee: Many technologists are pushing for increased use of multithreading in software in order to take advantage of the predicted increases in parallelism in computer architectures. In this paper, I argue that this is not a good idea.

Weiqi Gao's Observations - concurrency tag

Eric Burke: Java Concurrency By Example

I Need To Get That Book!

The Problem With Threads