Who should attend: Anyone involved or planning to get involved in the development of concurrent Java applications or applets. A basic familiarity with the Java language is assumed.

What you will learn: A detailed working knowledge of Java's concurrency mechanisms and an overview of the little-documented aspects of applet and AWT threading models.

Java directly supports concurrent programming. The use of concurrency adds a new dimension of complexity to application development and introduces its own unique set of problems. This course combines a low-level examination of the Java concurrency model with a higher-level look at specific approaches to concurrency control in the context of the Java language, Java applets, and GUI programming using the Abstract Windowing Toolkit.

Topics include:

- Concurrency in Java: a language tutorial
- Java concurrency mechanisms

• Threads: creation, initialization, control
• Synchronization: interference, locks, wait-sets
• Scheduling: priorities, time-slicing, queuing

• Thread groups: control, management
• Security: security manager, thread restrictions
• Volatile variables: atomicity, caching, volatility

• Inheritance model
• Inheritance anomaly

• Abstract Windowing Toolkit: structure, thread model, event handling and drawing
• Concurrency in applets: structure, thread model, threading semantics
• Applet security: mechanisms, policies and affects on threading
• Simple design patterns for common applet/AWT threading situations

David Holmes is a PhD candidate with the Microsoft Research Institute at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia where he researches concurrent object-oriented programming in practical contexts. He has practical experience with concurrent programming through work on operating systems, distributed systems, and real-time embedded systems within a university environment.

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