ephen AEdwards Al.ppt

Concurrency in Java Prof. Stephen A. Edwards The Java Language Developed by James Gosling et al. at Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s Originally called “Oak,” first intended application was as an OS for TV set top boxes Main goals were portability and safety Originally for embedded consumer software The Java Language Set-top boxes: nobody cared Next big application: “applets” Little programs dynamically added to web browsers Enormous Sun marketing blitz Partial failure: Incompatible Java implementations Few users had enough bandwidth Fantastically slow Java interpreters Javascript has largely taken over this role High-level scripting language Has nothing to do with the Java language The Java Language Where does Java succeed? Corporate programming E.g., dynamic web page generation from large corporate databases in banks Environment demands simpler language Unskilled programmers, unreleased software Speed, Space not critical Tends to be run on very large servers Main objective is reduced development time The Java Language Where does Java succeed? Education Well-designed general-purpose programming language Spares programmer from many common pitfalls Uninitialized pointers Memory management Widely known and used, not just a teaching language Embedded Systems? Jury is still out Overview of Java Derived from C++, but incompatible Didn’t want to call it “C += 2”? No “loose” functions: everything part of a class Better package support (no preprocessor) Safer object references instead of pointers Large, powerful class library Automatic garbage collection Programmer spared from memory management Concurrency in Java Language supports threads Multiple contexts/program counters running within the same memory space All objects can be shared among threads Fundamentally nondeterministic Language provide some facilities to help avoid it Thread Basics How to create a thread: class MyThread extends Thread { public void run() { /* thread body */ } } MyThread mt = new