Threads

[Raveendran Karunakaran]

Can anybody teach me as in the simplest of ways as to how i can use threads in my applications ?

[rani bedi]

A thread, called as a lightweight process, is a single sequential flow of control within a program. You use threads to isolate tasks. The JVM allows an application to have multiple threads of execution running concurrently. Every thread has a priority. Threads with higher priority are executed in preference to threads with lower priority.
There are two ways to create a new thread of execution.
One is to declare a class to be a subclass of Thread. This subclass should override the run method of class Thread. An instance of the subclass can then be allocated and started.
For e.g., a thread that does some computation

class myThread extends Thread 
{
  int i;
  myThread(int i) 
  {
     this.i = i;
  }
 
  public void run() 
  {
  // compute . . .
  }
}

The following code would then create a thread and start it running:

myThread m = new myThread(143);
m.start();

The other way to create a thread is to declare a class that implements the Runnable interface thus implementing the run() method. An instance of the class can then be allocated, passed as an argument when creating Thread, and started.
For e.g.

class myThread2 extends Thread 
{
  int i;
  myThread2(int i) 
  {
     this.i = i;
  }
 
  public void run() 
  {
  // compute . . .
  }
}

The following code would then create a thread and start it running:

myThread2 m = new myThread2(100);
new Thread(m).start();