Re: Creating a Thread Manager

From:

"Robert Klemme" <shortcutter@googlemail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 22:03:49 +0200

Message-ID:

<4o03p5FcebtjU1@individual.net>

nkunkov@escholar.com wrote:

Lets say that I have a screen that lists 4 totally different tasks
that the user can start running at the same time. The user can also
stop one or more of these tasks by clicking a button. When the task
is stopped, the thread in which this task is running should do some
clean up and terminate. That's the gist of it. I don't know if I
need a thread pool or should I just write a custom thread manager?
Are there some resources that describe a best way to build such a
thread manager? Thanks for your help.

You have two options: start a thread per task or use a pool. The choice
depends on scalability and other requirements. Either way you can implement
your tasks as Runnable - even if you use a thread pool. In Runnable's
implementation of run() you can use that Thread.interrupt() to terminate
work and interrupt current activities. You can then catch that on top level
of run() and deal appropriately with that. To ensure cleanup you probably
want to use finally blocks.

Doug Lea's book is an extremely useful read on the topic - not only for Java
IMHO:
http://www.awprofessional.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=0201310090

And here is his homepage
http://g.oswego.edu/

That should get you started.

Kind regards

robert