Building Blocks

The last chapter explored several techniques for constructing thread-safe classes, including delegating thread safety to existing thread-safe classes. Where practical, delegation is one of the most effective strategies for creating thread-safe classes: just let existing thread-safe classes manage all the state.

The platform libraries include a rich set of concurrent building blocks, such as thread-safe collections and a variety of synchronizers that can coordinate the control flow of cooperating threads. This chapter covers the most useful concurrent building blocks, especially those introduced in Java 5.0 and Java 6, and some patterns for using them to structure concurrent applications.