Chapter 17. Threads and Locks
While most of the discussion in the preceding chapters is concerned only with the behavior of code as executed a single statement or expression at a time, that is, by a single thread, the Java Virtual Machine can support many threads of execution at once. These threads independently execute code that operates on values and objects residing in a shared main memory. Threads may be supported by having many hardware processors, by time-slicing a single hardware processor, or by time-slicing many hardware processors.
Threads are represented by the Thread class. The only way for a user to create a thread is to create an object of this class; each thread is associated with such an object. A thread will start when the
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