Java Concurrency Idioms

This presentation will look at the many new additions in Java 5 and 6 for concurrent programming such as Atomics, Locks, synchronizers, and concurrent collections. In particular, we will be looking at common concurrency idioms around locking and access to shared state, thread coordination, thread pooling, and work execution. Each of these topics will be presented with code examples demonstrating common idioms and the usage of these new concurrency primitives.

Some topics we will cover in detail include:

• Thread coordination with Thread.join(), CountdownLatch, and CyclicBarrier
• Access to shared state with synchronized, volatile, Atomics, Lock, ReadWriteLock
• Using Locks and Conditions to achieve more flexibility than synchronized and wait/notify
• Concurrent collections like ConcurrentHashMap, CopyOnWriteArrayList, and ConcurrentSkipListMap
• Work execution with Queues, ThreadPools, and Executors

About Alex Miller

Alex Miller is a Sr. Engineer with Terracotta Inc, the makers of the open-source Java clustering product Terracotta. Prior to Terracotta, Alex worked at BEA Systems on the AquaLogic product line and was Chief Architect at MetaMatrix. His interests include Java, concurrency, distributed systems, query languages, and software design. Alex enjoys writing his blog at http://tech.puredanger.com and has spoken at a number of Java user group meetings and conferences.

In St. Louis, Alex is responsible for founding the Lambda Lounge, a user group for the study of functional and dynamic languages.

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