I am writing an application similar to a chat server-client pair.
I am planning on having a central Object which will hold new messages received from clients until they are dealt with by the main thread.
My application is multi-threaded. Each client will be on its own thread, so multiple threads will be adding messages to this central Object.
The main thread will check this Object for messages, remove the “oldest” and deal with it appropriately. Preferably I would like the messages to be handled in the same order they were added (FIFO).
What type of Object is most appropriate to hold the new messages? I looked into Vectors and ArrayLists, but I am confused about the synchronization aspect. I never worked with synchronization or threads before.
Thank you
ConcurrentLinkedQueuesounds likely.More info here: How to use ConcurrentLinkedQueue?
Javadoc here: http://download-llnw.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/ConcurrentLinkedQueue.html