Java Reference
In-Depth Information
C H A P T E R 6
Touring Additional Utility APIs
Chapter 5
introduced youto the Collections Framework, which is a collection ofutility
APIs.
Chapter 6
introduces you to additional utility APIs, specifically the concurrency
utilities,
Objects
, and
Random
.
Concurrency Utilities
Java5introducedtheconcurrencyutilities,whichareclassesandinterfacesthatsimplify
the development of concurrent (multithreaded) applications. These types are located
in the
java.util.concurrent
package and in its
java.util.concurrent.atomic
and
java.util.concurrent.locks
subpackages.
implementations and provide higher-level building blocks to simplify creating multith-
readed applications. They are organized into executor, synchronizer, concurrent collec-
tion, lock, atomic variable, and additional utility categories.
Executors
Chapter 4
introduced the Threading API, which lets you execute runnable tasks via ex-
pressions such as
new Thread(new RunnableTask()).start();
. These ex-
pressions tightly couple task submission with the task's execution mechanics (run on
the current thread, a new thread, or a thread arbitrarily chosen from a pool [group] of
threads).
Note
A
task
isanobjectwhoseclassimplementsthe
java.lang.Runnable
in-
terface (a runnable task) or the
java.util.concurrent.Callable
interface (a
callable task).