Understanding JVM Futures

Starting with JDK 5, we have had Futures, and they mostly went ignored. Now with concurrency and reactive technology in demand, it is essential that we understand what futures are, and how to handle them and make use of their power in asynchronous systems.

This presentation is a basic ground up introduction to Futures. We start with Futures and how they came packaged with JDK 5. We take a look at Executors, how to create a thread pool, which pool you should choose. How to model Futures in the JDK and show the difference for awaiting the answer and taking on the answer asynchronously. We also take a look at what a Promise is and when to use one. We then invest time taking a look at Guava's callback solution. Then we finally look at the handling of futures in both Scala and Clojure.

About Daniel Hinojosa

Daniel is a programmer, consultant, instructor, speaker, and recent author. With over 20 years of experience, he does work for private, educational, and government institutions. He is also currently a speaker for No Fluff Just Stuff tour. Daniel loves JVM languages like Java, Groovy, and Scala; but also dabbles with non JVM languages like Haskell, Ruby, Python, LISP, C, C++. He is an avid Pomodoro Technique Practitioner and makes every attempt to learn a new programming language every year. For downtime, he enjoys reading, swimming, Legos, football, and barbecuing.

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