Writing a book on Java in the age of Internet time is hard: the sand on which we’re standing is constantly shifting. But we’ve drawn a line in that sand, and the line we’ve drawn is at the JDK™ 2 from Sun Microsystems. It’s likely that versions of Java that postdate Java 2 will contain some changes to the threading system not discussed in this version of the book. We will also point out the differences between Java 2 and previous versions of Java as we go, so that developers who are using earlier releases of Java will also be able to use this book.
Some vendors that provide Java—either embedded in browsers or as a development system—are contemplating releasing extensions to Java that provide additional functionality to Java’s threading system (in much the same way as the examples we provide in Chapter 5 through Chapter 8 use the basic techniques of the Java threaded system to provide additional functionality). Those extensions are beyond the scope of this book: we’re concerned only with the reference JDK 2 from Sun Microsystems. The only time we’ll consider platform differences is in reference to an area of the reference JDK that differs on Unix platforms and Windows platforms: these platforms contain some differences in the scheduling of Java threads, a topic we’ll address in Chapter 6.
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