Link Details

Threading in Java has long been the domain of the brave or foolish, weaving a brittle and intricate web of manual synchronization between threads, or threads waiting on other threads to feed them work. We all know the examples from old Java books where there might be a thread running in a loop, sleeping for a second, and waking up to check if work needs to be done. This kind of implementation is still being taught to newcomers to the Java language. And when they start writing their own applications in Java, they find that this approach does not scale. Not along the axis of program complexity, nor the axis of the number of threads. In a complex application or one with many threads, you may end up with a program that stops doing anything at all for long periods of time, or worse, hangs forever, while still consuming all the operating system resources that go with those threads.