Java™ How To Program (Early Objects), Tenth Edition

Section 23.9 (Advanced) Producer/Consumer Relationship: The Lock and Condition Interfaces

• The Lock and Condition interfaces (p. 1002) give programmers more precise control over thread synchronization, but are more complicated to use.

• Any object can contain a reference to an object that implements the Lock interface (of package java.util.concurrent.locks). A thread calls a Lock’s lock method (p. 1002) to acquire the lock. Once a Lock has been obtained by one thread, the Lock will not allow another thread to obtain it until the first thread releases it (by calling the Lock’s unlock method; p. 1002).

• If several threads are trying to call method lock on the same Lock object at the same time, only one thread can obtain the lock—the others are ...