Concurrency Utilities

The java.util.concurrent, java.util.concurrent.atomic, and java.util.concurrent.locks packages provide a powerful, extensible framework of high-performance, scalable, thread-safe building blocks for developing concurrent classes and applications, including thread pools, thread-safe collections, semaphores, a task scheduling framework, task synchronization utilities, atomic variables, and locks. The addition of these packages to the core class library frees the programmer from the need to craft these utilities by hand, in much the same manner that the Collections Framework did for data structures. Additionally, these packages provide low-level primitives for advanced concurrent programming which take advantage of concurrency support provided by the processor, enabling programmers to implement high-performance, highly scalable concurrent algorithms in the Java language to a degree not previously possible without resorting to native code.

Refer to JSR 166 and to the documentation at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/concurrency/index.html.