How do the new fork/join tasks provided by Java SE 7 make it easier to write parallel programs?
Published July 2011
Multicore processors are now widespread across server, desktop, and laptop hardware. They are also making their way into smaller devices, such as smartphones and tablets. They open new possibilities for concurrent programming because the threads of a process can be executed on several cores in parallel. One important technique for achieving maximal performance in applications is the ability to split intensive tasks into chunks that can be performed in parallel to maximize the use of computational power.
Dealing with concurrent (parallel) programming has traditionally been difficult, because you have to deal with thread synchronization and the pitfalls of shared data. Interest in language-level support for concurrent programming on the Java platform is strong, as proven by the efforts in the Groovy (GPars), Scala, and Clojure communities. These communities all try to provide comprehensive programming models and efficient implementations that mask the pain points associated with multithreaded and distributed applications. The Java language itself should not be considered inferior in this regard. Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) 5 and then Java SE 6 introduced a set of packages providing powerful concurrency building blocks. Java SE 7 further enhanced them by adding support for parallelism
The following article starts with a brief recall of concurrent programming in Java, starting with the low-level mechanisms that have existed since the early releases. It then shows the rich primitives added by the java.util.concurrent packages before presenting fork/join tasks, an essential addition provided in Java SE 7 by the fork/join framework. An example usage of the new APIs is given. Finally, a discussion on the approach precedes the conclusion.
In what follows, we assume that the reader comes from a Java SE 5 or Java SE 6 background. We present a few pragmatic language evolutions of Java SE 7 along the way.
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