In the computer world, when we talk about concurrency, we refer to a series of independent and unrelated tasks that run simultaneously on a computer. This simultaneity can be real if the computer has more than one processor or a multi-core processor, or it can be apparent if the computer has only one core processor.
All modern operating systems allow the execution of concurrent tasks. You can read your e-mails while listening to music or reading news on a web page. We can say this is process-level concurrency. But inside a process, we can also have various simultaneous tasks. Concurrent tasks that run inside a process are called threads. Another concept related to concurrency is parallelism. There are different definitions and relations with the concurrency concept. Some authors talk about concurrency when you execute your application with multiple threads in a single-core processor. With this, you can see when your program execution is apparent. They talk about parallelism when you execute your application with multiple threads in a multi-core processor or in a computer with more than one processor, so this case is real as well. Other authors talk about concurrency when the threads of an application are executed without a predefined order, and they discuss parallelism when all these threads are executed in an ordered way.
This chapter presents a number of recipes that will show you how to perform basic operations with threads, using the Java 9 API. You will see how to create and run threads in a Java program, how to control their execution, process exceptions thrown by them, and how to group some threads to manipulate them as a unit.
