Real-Time Java™ Platform Programming

Bound Async Event Handlers

A bound async event handler is permanently associated with a thread. Depending on the details of the implementation, a bound async event handler might be able to respond more quickly to events. An implementation could implement this so all bound async event handlers were bound to one shared thread, but that would violate the spirit of the specification. The idea is to reserve a thread for the AEH. The runtime can prime the thread to execute the AEH with execution poised to enter the AEH's handleAsyncEvent method. When a bound AEH fires, the runtime can handle it relatively quickly and predictably.

A side effect Async event handlers are schedulable entities. They have (by the spec) all the capabilities of threads, but ...