The Java Tutorials have been written for JDK 8. Examples and practices described in this page don't take advantage of improvements introduced in later releases and might use technology no longer available.
See Java Language Changes for a summary of updated language features in Java SE 9 and subsequent releases.
See JDK Release Notes for information about new features, enhancements, and removed or deprecated options for all JDK releases.
The following example brings together some of the concepts of this section.
SimpleThreads
consists of two threads. The first is the main thread that every Java application has. The main thread creates a new thread from the Runnable
object, MessageLoop
, and waits for it to finish. If the MessageLoop
thread takes too long to finish, the main thread interrupts it.
The MessageLoop
thread prints out a series of messages. If interrupted before it has printed all its messages, the MessageLoop
thread prints a message and exits.
public class SimpleThreads { // Display a message, preceded by // the name of the current thread static void threadMessage(String message) { String threadName = Thread.currentThread().getName(); System.out.format("%s: %s%n", threadName, message); } private static class MessageLoop implements Runnable { public void run() { String importantInfo[] = { "Mares eat oats", "Does eat oats", "Little lambs eat ivy", "A kid will eat ivy too" }; try { for (int i = 0; i < importantInfo.length; i++) { // Pause for 4 seconds Thread.sleep(4000); // Print a message threadMessage(importantInfo[i]); } } catch (InterruptedException e) { threadMessage("I wasn't done!"); } } } public static void main(String args[]) throws InterruptedException { // Delay, in milliseconds before // we interrupt MessageLoop // thread (default one hour). long patience = 1000 * 60 * 60; // If command line argument // present, gives patience // in seconds. if (args.length > 0) { try { patience = Long.parseLong(args[0]) * 1000; } catch (NumberFormatException e) { System.err.println("Argument must be an integer."); System.exit(1); } } threadMessage("Starting MessageLoop thread"); long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis(); Thread t = new Thread(new MessageLoop()); t.start(); threadMessage("Waiting for MessageLoop thread to finish"); // loop until MessageLoop // thread exits while (t.isAlive()) { threadMessage("Still waiting..."); // Wait maximum of 1 second // for MessageLoop thread // to finish. t.join(1000); if (((System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime) > patience) && t.isAlive()) { threadMessage("Tired of waiting!"); t.interrupt(); // Shouldn't be long now // -- wait indefinitely t.join(); } } threadMessage("Finally!"); } }