Java Concurrency in Practice

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 earlier than they would on their own, perhaps because the user cancel...

An activity is cancellable if external code can move it to completion before its normal completion. There are a number of reasons why you might want to cancel an activity: User-requested cancellation. The user clicked on the "cancel" butto...

Applications commonly create services that own threads, such as thread pools, and the lifetime of these services is usually longer than that of the method that creates them. If the application is to shut down gracefully, the threads owned by these se...

7.3. It is obvious when a single-threaded console application terminates due to an uncaught exceptionthe program stops running and produces a stack trace that is very different from typical program output. Failure of a thread in a concurrent applic...

7.4. The JVM can shut down in either an orderly or abrupt manner. An orderly shutdown is initiated when the last "normal" (nondaemon) thread terminates, someone calls System.exit, or by other platform-specific means (such as sending a SIG...

End-of-lifecycle issues for tasks, threads, services, and applications can add complexity to their design and implementation. Java does not provide a preemptive mechanism for cancelling activities or terminating threads. Instead, it provides a cooper...