Java Concurrency in Practice

Chapter 1. Writing correct programs is hard; writing correct concurrent programs is harder. There are simply more things that can go wrong in a concurrent program than in a sequential one. So, why do we bother with con...

Chapter 2. Thread Safety Perhaps surprisingly, concurrent programming isn't so much about threads or locks, any more than civil engineering is about rivets and I-beams. Of course, building bridges that don't fall down r...

Chapter 3. Sharing Objects We stated at the beginning of Chapter 2 that writing correct concurrent programs is primarily about managing access to shared, mutable state. That chapter was about using synchronization to pr...

Chapter 4. Composing Objects So far, we've covered the low-level basics of thread safety and synchronization. But we don't want to have to analyze each memory access to ensure that our program is thread-safe; we want to...

Chapter 5. Building Blocks The last chapter explored several techniques for constructing thread-safe classes, including delegating thread safety to existing thread-safe classes. Where practical, delegation is one of the...

Chapter 6. Task Execution Most concurrent applications are organized around the execution of tasks: abstract, discrete units of work. Dividing the work of an application into tasks simplifies program organization, facil...

Chapter 7. Cancellation and Shutdown It is easy to start tasks and threads. Most of the time we allow them to decide when to stop by letting them run to completion. Sometimes, however, we want to stop tasks or threads e...

Chapter 8. Applying Thread Pools Chapter 6 introduced the task execution framework, which simplifies management of task and thread lifecycles and provides a simple and flexible means for decoupling task submission from...

Chapter 9. GUI Applications If you've tried to write even a simple GUI application using Swing, you know that GUI applications have their own peculiar threading issues. To maintain safety, certain tasks must run in the...

Chapter 10. Avoiding Liveness Hazards There is often a tension between safety and liveness. We use locking to ensure thread safety, but indiscriminate use of locking can cause lock-ordering deadlocks. Similarly, we use...

Chapter 11. Performance and Scalability One of the primary reasons to use threads is to improve performance.[1] Using threads can improve resource utilization by letting applications more easily exploit available proces...

Chapter 12. Testing Concurrent Programs Concurrent programs employ similar design principles and patterns to sequential programs. The difference is that concurrent programs have a degree of nondeterminism that sequentia...

Chapter 13. Explicit Locks Before Java 5.0, the only mechanisms for coordinating access to shared data were synchronized and volatile. Java 5.0 adds another option: ReentrantLock. Contrary to what some have written, Ree...

Chapter 14. Building Custom Synchronizers The class libraries include a number of state-dependent classesthose having operations with state-based preconditionssuch as FutureTask, Semaphore, and BlockingQueue. For exampl...

Chapter 15. Atomic Variables and Nonblocking Synchronization Many of the classes in java.util.concurrent, such as Semaphore and ConcurrentLinkedQueue, provide better performance and scalability than alternatives using s...

Chapter 16. The Java Memory Model Throughout this book, we've mostly avoided the low-level details of the Java Memory Model (JMM) and instead focused on higher-level design issues such as safe publication, specification...