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Trail: Essential Classes
Lesson: Concurrency
Section: High Level Concurrency Objects
Concurrency
Processes and Threads
Thread Objects
Defining and Starting a Thread
Pausing Execution with Sleep
Interrupts
Joins
The SimpleThreads Example
Synchronization
Thread Interference
Memory Consistency Errors
Synchronized Methods
Intrinsic Locks and Synchronization
Atomic Access
Liveness
Deadlock
Starvation and Livelock
Guarded Blocks
Immutable Objects
A Synchronized Class Example
A Strategy for Defining Immutable Objects
High Level Concurrency Objects
Lock Objects
Executors
Executor Interfaces
Thread Pools
Concurrent Collections
Atomic Variables
For Further Reading
Questions and Exercises
Home Page > Essential Classes > Concurrency
Lock Objects

> Synchronized code relies on a simple kind of reentrant lock. This kind of lock is easy to use, but has many limitations. More sophisticated locking idioms are supported by the `java.util.concurrency.locks` package. We won't examine this package in detail, but instead will focus on its most basic interface, `Lock`.

> `Lock` objects work very much like the implicit locks used by synchronized code. As with implicit locks, only one thread can own a `Lock` object at a time. `Lock` objects also support a `wait/notify` mechanism, through their associated `Condition` objects.

> The biggest advantage of `Lock` objects over implicit locks is their ability to back out of an attempt to acquire a lock. The `tryLock` method backs out if the lock is not available immediately or before a timeout expires (if specified). The `lockInterruptibly` method backs out if another thread sends an interrupt before the lock is acquired.

> Let's use `Lock` objects to solve the deadlock problem we saw in Liveness. Alphonse and Gaston have trained themselves to notice when a friend is about to bow. We model this improvement by requiring that our `Friend` objects must acquire locks for both participants before proceeding with the bow. Here is the source code for the improved model, ``Safelock``. To demonstrate the versatility of this idiom, we assume that Alphonse and Gaston are so infatuated with their newfound ability to bow safely that they can't stop bowing to each other:

> >     import java.util.concurrent.locks.Lock;
> >     import java.util.concurrent.locks.ReentrantLock;
> >     import java.util.Random;

> >     public class Safelock {
> >         static class Friend {
> >             private final String name;
> >             private final Lock lock = new ReentrantLock();

> >             public Friend(String name) {
> >                 this.name = name;
> >             }

> >             public String getName() {
> >                 return this.name;
> >             }

> >             public boolean impendingBow(Friend bower) {
> >                 Boolean myLock = false;
> >                 Boolean yourLock = false;
> >                 try {
> >                     myLock = lock.tryLock();
> >                     yourLock = bower.lock.tryLock();
> >                 } finally {
> >                     if (! (myLock && yourLock)) {
> >                         if (myLock) {
> >                             lock.unlock();
> >                         }
> >                         if (yourLock) {
> >                             bower.lock.unlock();
> >                         }
> >                     }
> >                 }
> >                 return myLock && yourLock;
> >             }

> >             public void bow(Friend bower) {
> >                 if (impendingBow(bower)) {
> >                     try {
> >                         System.out.format("%s: %s has bowed to me!%n",
> >                                 this.name, bower.getName());
> >                         bower.bowBack(this);
> >                     } finally {
> >                         lock.unlock();
> >                         bower.lock.unlock();
> >                     }
> >                 } else {
> >                     System.out.format("%s: %s started to bow to me, but" +
> >                             " saw that I was already bowing to him.%n",
> >                             this.name, bower.getName());
> >                 }
> >             }

> >             public void bowBack(Friend bower) {
> >                 System.out.format("%s: %s has bowed back to me!%n",
> >                         this.name, bower.getName());
> >             }
> >         }

> >         static class BowLoop implements Runnable {
> >             private Friend bower;
> >             private Friend bowee;

> >             public BowLoop(Friend bower, Friend bowee) {
> >                 this.bower = bower;
> >                 this.bowee = bowee;
> >             }

> >             public void run() {
> >                 Random random = new Random();
> >                 for (;;) {
> >                     try {
> >                         Thread.sleep(random.nextInt(10));
> >                     } catch (InterruptedException e) {}
> >                     bowee.bow(bower);
> >                 }
> >             }
> >         }

> >         public static void main(String[] args) {
> >             final Friend alphonse = new Friend("Alphonse");
> >             final Friend gaston = new Friend("Gaston");
> >             new Thread(new BowLoop(alphonse, gaston)).start();
> >             new Thread(new BowLoop(gaston, alphonse)).start();
> >         }
> >     }

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