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Chapter 15
Concurrency Updates
The Concurrency Utilities, introduced with the release of Tiger, is comprised of the interfaces and classes in the java.util.concurrent package and its subpackages. It reduces programming effort and increases performance. More importantly, it spares you from having to deal with low-level concurrency primitives such as the wait, notify, and notifyAll methods in java.lang.Object as well as the synchronized and volatile keywords. These primitives are notorious for being difficult to use correctly.
The Concurrency Utilities includes concurrent implementations of several members of the Collections Framework. Mustang adds more to the stack by introducing, among others, the BlockingDeque interface. This interface is the focus of discussion in this chapter. In addition, this chapter covers the new methods in the TimeUnit enum and the new constructor in ConcurrentHashMap.