Java theory and practice: Concurrency made simple (sort of)

Like many other application infrastructure services, concurrency utility classes such as work queues and thread pools are often needlessly rewritten from scratch for every project. This month, Brian Goetz offers an introduction to Doug Lea's util.concurrent package, a high-quality, widely used, open-source package of concurrency utilities.

The util.concurrent package contains many useful classes, some of which you may recognize as better versions of classes you've already written, perhaps even more than once. They are battle-tested, high-performance implementations of many of the basic building blocks of multithreaded applications. util.concurrent was the starting point for JSR 166, which will be producing a set of concurrency utilities that will become the java.util.concurrent package in JDK 1.5, but you don't have to wait until then. In a future article, I'll look at some of the custom synchronization classes in util.concurrent, and explore some of the ways in which the util.concurrent and java.util.concurrent APIs differ.

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