Introduction

Concurrency—the ability to execute several procedures in parallel—becomes increasingly important as big-data analysis moves into the mainstream of modern applications. Having CPUs or several cores in one CPU helps increase the throughput, but the growth rate of the data volume will always outpace hardware advances. Besides, even in a multiple-CPU system, one still has to structure the code and think about resource-sharing to take advantage of the available computational power.  

 

In the previous chapters, we demonstrated how lambdas with functional interfaces and parallel streams made concurrent processing part of the toolkit of every Java programmer. One can easily take advantage of this functionality with minimal, if any, guidance.

In this chapter, we will describe some other—old (before Java 9) and new—Java features and APIs that allow more control over concurrency. The high-level concurrency Java API has been around since Java 5. The JDK Enhancement Proposal (JEP) 266, More...