Question

I was wondering which would be the most efficient approach to implement some kind of background task in java (I guess that would be some kind of nonblocking Threads). To be more precise – I have some java code and then at some point I need to execute a long running operation. What I would like to do is to execute that operation in the background so that the rest of the program can continue executing and when that task is completed just update some specific object which. This change would be then detected by other components.

Answer 1

You should use Thread Pools,

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/essential/concurrency/pools.html