<Introduction to Java Programming> Note 02

Chapter 30 Multithreading and Parallel Programming

• You can create additional threads to run concurrent tasks in the program.
  
• In Java, each task is an instance of the Runnable interface, also called a runnable object.
  
• A thread is essentially an object that facilitates the execution of a task.
  

Since the Thread class implements Runnable, you could define a class that extends Thread and implements the run method, and then create an object from the class and invoke its start method in a client program to start the thread:

Instead of using the stop() method, you should assign null to a Thread variable to indicate that has stopped.

If a sleep method is invoked in a loop, you should wrap the loop in a try-catch block, as shown in (a) below. If the loop is outside the try-catch block, as shown in (b), the thread may continue to execute even though it is being interrupted.