Objectives

In this chapter you’ll learn:

• What threads are and why they are useful.

• How threads enable you to manage concurrent activities.

• The life cycle of a thread.

• Thread priorities and scheduling.

• To create and execute Runnables.

• Thread synchronization.

• What producer/consumer relationships are and how they are implemented with multithreading.

• To enable multiple threads to update Swing GUI components in a thread-safe manner.

• About interfaces Callable and Future, which you can use with threading to execute tasks that return results.