When you work with a computer, you can do several things at once. You can listen to music while you edit a document in a word processor and read your e-mails. This can be done because your operating system allows the concurrency of tasks. Concurrent programming is about the elements and mechanisms a platform offers to have multiple tasks or programs running at once and communicating with each other, to exchange data or to synchronize with each other. Java is a concurrent platform, and it offers a lot of classes to execute concurrent tasks inside a Java program. With each version, Java increases the functionalities offered to programmers to facilitate the development of concurrent programs. This book covers the most important and useful mechanisms included in version 9 of the Java concurrency API, so you will be able to use them directly in your applications. The mechanisms are as follows:
- Basic thread management
- Thread synchronization mechanisms
- Thread creation and management delegation with executors
- Fork/Join framework to enhance the performance of your application
- Parallel streams to process big sets of data in a parallel way, including the new Java 9 reactive streams
- Data structures for concurrent programs
- Adapting the default behavior of some concurrency classes to your needs
- Testing Java concurrency applications
