Introduction to Concurrency

Learning Objectives

1. Describe the difference between a thread and a process
2. Describe the two major problems that occur in multi-threaded systems
3. Write programs using threads in Java
4. Write programs using thread safe collections, queues and executors
5. Lab: Understand and run a simple servlet in tomcat

Module Contents

1. Why threads? Simple threads in Java
2. Problems with threading and Synchronization primitives
3. Thread coordination and Thread states
4. The Producer-Consumer problem and Thread Pools
5. Thread-safe collections

Code Examples

Can be found here

Reading

Mandatory:

• Chapter 4 of Foundations of Scalable Systems

Optional:

• Java Concurrency in Practice 1st Edition, by Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes, Doug Lea ** Chapters 1-8 are relevant to the assignments, so use these as your main sourse of information
• Shooting yourself in the foot with Random number generators
• Interesting article on thread-safe Java collections

Lab 2

Aims:

1. Experiment with threads
2. Build a Java Servlet to process two of the APIs in Assignment 1
3. Echo the API parameter values back to the client
4. Learn simple testing with POSTMAN

Follow the instructions here

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