Threads - JavaTech: An Introduction to Scientific and Technical Computing with Java - page 254

Yo u create a thread class in one of two ways:
1. Create a subclass of the Thread class and override the run() method.
2. Create a class that implements the Runnable interface, which has only one method:
run() .Pass a reference to this class in the constructor of Thread . The thread then
calls back to this run () method when the thread starts.
In the following sections we examine these two thread creation techniques
further.
8.2.1 Thread creation: subclass
Creating a subclass of Thread offers the most conceptually straightforward
approach to threading. In this approach the subclass overrides the run() method
with the code you wish to process. The following code segments illustrate this
approach.
The class MyThread extends the Thread class and overrides the method
run() with one that contains a loop that prints out a message until a counter
hits 20.
public class MyThread extends Thread
{
public void run () {
int count = 0;
while (true) {
System.out.println ("Thread alive");
// Print every 0.10sec for 2 seconds
try {
Thread.sleep (100);
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {}
count++;
if (count >= 20) break;
}
System.out.println ("Thread stopping");
} // run
} // class MyThread
In MyApplet shown below, the start() method creates an instance of the
MyThread class and invokes the thread's start() method. This will in turn
invoke the run() method. The thread goes into a loop and prints a message every
100 ms using the Thread class static method sleep(long time) ,where time