Are there any better options for handling concurrency outside of the core Java classes?
Alex Miller: Well first I’d like to say that I wish more people made better use of what is already offered by java.util.concurrent! I would highly recommend using Locks, the various thread coordination classes like CyclicBarrier and CountdownLatch, and Executors to clean up a lot of old code. In general, any time you are explicitly creating Threads, using Thread.join() or wait()/notify(), there are probably better alternatives in the concurrency library. For concurrency geeks like me, this is a wonderful time as there is a cornucopia of work occurring on alternative languages and concurrency paradigms. In Java, JDK 7 will contain a new library from Doug Lea called fork / join that is designed to support fine-grained parallelism of divide-and-conquer sorts of problems. That will be a great addition to the executors and other tools we have currently for coarse-grained parallelism in the JDK. There has been a lot of buzz recently about the “actor” model of concurrency which is a form of m
