Section 1. About this tutorial What is this tutorial about? JDK 5.0 is a major step forward for the creation of highly scalable concurrentapplications in the Java language. The JVM has been improved to allow classesto take advantage of hardware-level concurrency support, and a rich set of newconcurrency building blocks has been provided to make it easier to developconcurrent applications. This tutorial covers the new utility classes for concurrency provided by JDK 5.0and demonstrates how these classes offer improved scalability compared to theexisting concurrency primitives ( synchronized , wait() , and notify() ).

Should I take this tutorial? While this tutorial is aimed at a wide range of levels, it is assumed that readershave a basic understanding of threads, concurrency, and the concurrencyprimitives provided by the Java language, particularly the semantics and correctuse of synchronization. Beginning readers may wish to first consult the "Introduction to Java Threads"tutorial (see Resources on page 35), or read the concurrency chapter of a general purpose introductory text on the Java language. Many of the classes in the java.util.concurrent package use generics, as java.util.concurrent has other strong dependencies on the JDK 5.0 JVM. Users not familiar with generics may wish to consult resources on the newgenerics facility in JDK 5.0. (For those not familiar with generics, you may find ituseful to simply ignore whatever is inside the angle brackets in class andmethod signatures in your first pass through this tutorial.)