Spring: Using "Lookup method injection" for my ThreadFactory looks not scalable.

Question

Hi,

We're building a ThreadFactory so everytime a singleton controller needs a new thread, i get a new instance everytime.

Looking at Lookup method injection looks good but what if we have multiple thread classes? I like the fact that i can autowire my threadBeans.

like:

public abstract class ThreadManager {
        public abstract Thread createThreadA();
        public abstract Thread createThreadB();
}

and config:

<bean id="threadManager" class="bla.ThreadManager" singleton="true">
    <lookup-method name="createThreadA" bean="threadA" />
    <lookup-method name="createThreadB" bean="threadB"/>
</bean>
<!-- Yes! i can autowire now :)-->
<bean id="threadA" class="bla.ThreadA" singleton="false" autowire="byType">
<bean id="threadB" class="bla.ThreadB" singleton="false" autowire="byType">

and usage:

threadManager.createThreadA();

Question: I don't want to create an abstract "create" method for every new threadclass.

Is it possible to make this generich like:

threadManager.createThread(ThreadA.class);

I also looked at ServiceLocatorFactoryBean but for multiple classes i have to pass the bean name (not type safe). Thank you

Answer 1

I don't think there is a way to do that automatically. And if you don't want to use ExecutorService, as suggested, you you can achieve this manually, if it is such a problem for you (but I don't think it is)

• make your threadManager implement ApplicationContextAware or BeanFactoryAware, thus obtaining the application context / bean factory
• in your createThread(..) method use the context/factory obtained above to get an instance of the thread bean (which should be of scope prototype of course)