Concurrent Programming in Java
© 1996-1999 Doug Lea

3.1 Dealing with Failure

Follow-ups

The caveats in the book about interruptions and interrupted IO should be made stronger for recent JDK releases. Interruptions and java.io increasingly do not mix well. However, as of JDK1.4, any concurrent program that needs interruptibility during IO should be using the java.nio package, which explicitly supports interruptible IO.

In particular, the code example on p173 illustrating workarounds using available has many limitations, among them not being able to distinguish EOFs from blocked reads. There are no good soluitions to this using only java.io, but these matters become straightforward using java.nio. (Thanks to Jim Yingst for pointing out problems.)

Readings and Resources

A pattern-based account of exception handling may be found in:

Renzel, Klaus. "Error Detection", in Frank Buschmann and Dirk Riehle (eds.) Proceedings of the 1997 European Pattern Languages of Programming Conference, Irsee, Germany, Siemens Technical Report 120/SW1/FB, 1997.

Some low-level techniques for protecting code from asynchronous cancellation or interruption (e.g., masking hardware interrupts) are not available or appropriate in the Java programming language. But even many systems-level developers avoid asynchronous cancellation at all costs. See for example Butenhof's book listed in §1.2.5. Similar concerns are expressed about concurrent object-oriented programs in:

Fleiner, Claudio, Jerry Feldman, and David Stoutamire. "Killing Threads Considered Dangerous", Proceedings of the POOMA '96 Conference, 1996.

Detecting and responding to termination of a group of threads can require more complex protocols when applied in less structured contexts than seen in most concurrent programs. General-purpose termination detection algorithms are discussed in several of the sources on concurrent and distributed programming listed in §1.2.5. Security management is described in:

Gong, Li. Inside JavaTM 2 Platform Security, Addison-Wesley, 1999.

A resource control framework is described in:

Czajkowski, Grzegorz, and Thorsten von Eicken. "JRes: A Resource Accounting Interface for Java", Proceedings of 1998 ACM OOPSLA Conference, ACM, 1998.

Doug Lea

Last modified: Sun Oct 17 07:53:28 EDT 1999