How to asynchronously call a method in Java

Question

Hi, I've been looking at Go's goroutines lately and thought it would be nice to have something similar in Java. As far as I've searched the common way to parallelize a method call is to do something like:

final String x = "somethingelse";
new Thread(new Runnable() {
           public void run() {
                x.matches("something");    
 }
}).start();

Thats not very elegant. Is there a better way of doing this? I needed such a solution in a project so I decided to implement my own wrapper class around a async method call.

I published my wrapper class in J-Go. But I don't know if it is a good solution. The usage is simple:

SampleClass obj = ...
FutureResult<Integer> res = ...
Go go = new Go(obj);
go.callLater(res, "intReturningMethod", 10);         //10 is a Integer method parameter
//... Do something else
//...
System.out.println("Result: "+res.get());           //Blocks until intReturningMethod returns

or less verbose:

Go.with(obj).callLater("myRandomMethod");
//... Go away
if (Go.lastResult().isReady())                //Blocks until myRandomMethod has ended
    System.out.println("Method is finished!");

Internally I'm using a class that implements Runnable and do some Reflection work to get the correct method object and invoking it.

I want some opinion about my tiny library and on the subject of making async method calls like this in Java. Is it safe? Is there already a simplier way?

Answer 1

You may wish to also consider the class java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.

If you are using Java 5 or later, FutureTask is a turnkey implementation of "A cancellable asynchronous computation."

There are even richer asynchronous execution scheduling behaviors available in the java.util.concurrent package (for example, ScheduledExecutorService), but FutureTask may have all the functionality you require.

I would even go so far as to say that it is no longer advisable to use the first code pattern you gave as an example ever since FutureTask became available. (Assuming you are on Java 5 or later.)

Answer 2

i don't like the ideia of using Reflection for that.
Not only dangerous for missing it in some refactoring, but it can also be denied by SecurityManager.

FutureTask is a good option as the other options from the java.util.concurrent package.
My favorite for simple tasks:

    Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor().submit(task);

little bit shorter than creating a Thread (task is a Callable or a Runnable)