Concurrency Utilities for Java EE 1.0

Concurrency Utilities for Java EE 1.0 was developed under JSR 236. This section gives you only an overview of the API. The complete document specification (for more information) can be downloaded from http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr236/index.html.

Why concurrency?

In computer science, concurrency is the ability of an application or a system to execute many tasks in parallel. Before the advent of multitasking system, computers could only run one process at a time. At that time, the programs were not only difficult to design, but they were also executed sequentially from beginning to end and when the machine was running a program that had access to a peripheral device, the running program was first interrupted to allow the reading of the peripheral.

Benefits of concurrency

The development of multitasking operating systems enabled the simultaneous execution of many processes (instances of running programs) within a machine and many threads...