java concurrency tutorial

I monitored a tutorial yesterday titled, “Java Concurrency Utilities in Practice”, which was really a compressed version of the fine book, Java Concurrency in Practice. Since I’ve only picked at bits and pieces of the book and haven’t applied a lot of it, the tutorial was actually a good review for me. The presenters reviewed common thread creation patterns and gave some great examples of how the Executor framework provides easy, black-box concurrency for Java developers.

The days of using callbacks to retrieve data after a thread completes a task seem to be over (even though I’ve recently done this…). Using Futures with ExecutorService make this so much more elegant and easy. Creating a thread pool with ThreadPoolExecutor is dead easy. For Java developers writing concurrent programs, java.util.concurrent kicks butt. Use it.