Book excerpts:

This is an introduction to using the Java programming language in concurrent or multithreaded applications. The context is the process synchronization material and related concurrent programming in operating systems courses as opposed to software engineering. Topics covered are race conditions when threads share data, critical sections, mutual exclusion, semaphores, monitors, message passing, the rendezvous, remote procedure calls, distributed or network programming, and parallel processing. Solutions to the classical problems talked about in operating systems courses (the dining philosophers, the bounded buffer producers and consumers, and the database readers and writers) are shown in Java. Also shown is how to animate algorithms using the command set of the Xtango animation interpreter, animator. Some of the animation examples can be viewed as applets.

The programs examples were developed and tested using Sun Microsystem's JDK version 1.0.2 and 1.1 for Solaris 2.x and Windows 95/NT (1996-1997). They have been updated to remove all 'deprecated' methods and constructors. The multimachine socket examples use the readObject() and writeObject() methods of the ObjectInputStream and ObjectOutPutStream classes, which are part of the RMI (remote method invocation) add-on for JDK 1.0.2 and included with JDK 1.1.

Note: The material is covered in much more detail in the book, Concurrent Programming: The Java Programming Language, published by Oxford University Press in March 1998.