Tackling Concurrency on the JVM

In this presentation we will take a quick walk though the issues with concurrency and how the solutions provided in Scala and Clojure help address those.

The gaining popularity of multi-core processors has rekindled the
concurrency question: How do you effectively implement multithreaded
applications on the Java platform? The familiar approach in Java is to
create threads and to manage access to shared mutable state using
synchronized locks. This approach to concurrency is fraught with hard work
and uncertainties. Have you marked the appropriate methods synchronized,
did you decorate the relevant fields volatile, did you properly construct
the mutually exclusive regions of code, and is there a potential for
deadlock lurking in the code.

In this talk you'll learn about alternate ways to tackling concurrency on
the JVM. One approach is the functional way, along with an actor based
model provided in Scala, to deal with immutable state. This removes the
problem at the root, since data can't change there is no issue of
contention to contend with. Another distinct approach, provided in
Clojure, is to protect access to mutable data, not using locks, but using
transactional boundary. The Software Transactional Memory brings database
like transaction model to in-memory data. In this presentation we will
discuss the pros and cons of these approaches and how to effectively apply
them.

About Venkat Subramaniam

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., creator of agilelearner.com, and an instructional professor at the University of Houston.

He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with sustainable agile practices on their software projects.

Venkat is a (co)author of multiple technical books, including the 2007 Jolt Productivity award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer. You can find a list of his books at agiledeveloper.com. You can reach him by email at venkats@agiledeveloper.com or on twitter at @venkat_s.

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