Async-ing a java task: ExecutorService & Future

At times, we need to make our task asynchronous, for instance, posting a message into 3 different destinations and the user is not concerned about the success of the each task's completion.


Then, ExecutorService can be used.


public interface Callable


A task that returns a result and may throw an exception. Implementors define a single method with no arguments called call.


The Callable interface is similar to Runnable, in that both are designed for classes whose instances are potentially executed by another thread. A Runnable, however, does not return a result and cannot throw a checked exception.


The Executors class contains utility methods to convert from other common forms to Callable classes.


Executors are Factory and utility methods for Executor, ExecutorService, ScheduledExecutorService, ThreadFactory, and Callable classes.




public interface ExecutorService extends Executor


An Executor that provides methods to manage termination and methods that can produce a Future for tracking progress of one or more asynchronous tasks.


An ExecutorService can be shut down, which will cause it to stop accepting new tasks. After being shut down, the executor will eventually terminate, at which point no tasks are actively executing, no tasks are awaiting execution, and no new tasks can be submitted.


Method submit extends base method Executor.execute(java.lang.Runnable) by creating and returning a Future that can be used to cancel execution and/or wait for completion. Methods invokeAny and invokeAll perform the most commonly useful forms of bulk execution, executing a collection of tasks and then waiting for at least one, or all, to complete. (Class ExecutorCompletionService can be used to write customized variants of these methods.)


The Executors class provides factory methods for the executor services provided in this package.
Usage Example


Here is a sketch of a network service in which threads in a thread pool service incoming requests. It uses the preconfigured Executors.newFixedThreadPool(int) factory method:


class NetworkService {
private final ServerSocket serverSocket;
private final ExecutorService pool;


public NetworkService(int port, int poolSize) throws IOException {
serverSocket = new ServerSocket(port);
pool = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(poolSize);
}


public void serve() {
try {
for (;;) {
pool.execute(new Handler(serverSocket.accept()));
}
} catch (IOException ex) {
pool.shutdown();
}
}
}


class Handler implements Runnable {
private final Socket socket;
Handler(Socket socket) { this.socket = socket; }
public void run() {
// read and service request
}
}


public interface Future


A Future represents the result of an asynchronous computation. Methods are provided to check if the computation is complete, to wait for its completion, and to retrieve the result of the computation. The result can only be retrieved using method get when the computation has completed, blocking if necessary until it is ready. Cancellation is performed by the cancel method. Additional methods are provided to determine if the task completed normally or was cancelled. Once a computation has completed, the computation cannot be cancelled. If you would like to use a Future for the sake of cancellability but not provide a usable result, you can declare types of the form Future and return null as a result of the underlying task.


Sample Usage (Note that the following classes are all made-up.)


interface ArchiveSearcher { String search(String target); }
class App {
ExecutorService executor = ...
ArchiveSearcher searcher = ...
void showSearch(final String target) throws InterruptedException {
Future future = executor.submit(new Callable() {
public String call() { return searcher.search(target); }
});
displayOtherThings(); // do other things while searching
try {
displayText(future.get()); // use future
} catch (ExecutionException ex) { cleanup(); return; }
}
}




The FutureTask class is an implementation of Future that implements Runnable, and so may be executed by an Executor. For example, the above construction with submit could be replaced by:


FutureTask future =
new FutureTask(new Callable() {
public String call() {
return searcher.search(target);
}});
executor.execute(future);