Question

I’m trying to get a handle on how to implement threading in a Java application that uses Spring for transaction management. I’ve found the TaskExecutor section in the Spring documentation, and ThreadPoolTaskExecutor looks like it would fit my needs;

ThreadPoolTaskExecutor

This implementation can only be used in a Java 5 environment but is also the most commonly used one in that environment. It exposes bean properties for configuring a java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor and wraps it in a TaskExecutor. If you need something advanced such as a ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor, it is recommended that you use a ConcurrentTaskExecutor instead.

However I have no idea how to go about using it. I’ve been searching for good examples for awhile now with no luck. If anyone can help me out I would appreciate it.

Answer 1

It’s pretty simple. The idea is that you have an executor object that’s a bean, which is passed into whatever object wants to fire the new task (in a new thread). The nice thing is that you can modify what type of task executor to use just by changing the Spring config. In the example below I’m taking some example class (ClassWithMethodToFire) and wrapping it in a Runnable object to do the fire; you could also actually implement Runnable in a class of your own, and then in the execute method you’d just call classWithMethodToFire.run().

Here’s a very simple example.

public class SomethingThatShouldHappenInAThread {
     private TaskExecutor taskExecutor;
     private ClassWithMethodToFire classWithMethodToFire;

     public SomethingThatShouldHappenInAThread(TaskExecutor taskExecutor,
                                               ClassWithMethodToFire classWithMethodToFire) {
          this.taskExecutor = taskExecutor;
          this.classWithMethodToFire = classWithMethodToFire;
     }

     public void fire(final SomeParameterClass parameter) {
          taskExecutor.execute( new Runnable() {
               public void run() {
                    classWithMethodToFire.doSomething( parameter );
               }
          });
     }
}

And here are the Spring beans:

<bean name="somethingThatShouldHappenInAThread" class="package.name.SomethingThatShouldHappenInAThread">
     <constructor-arg type="org.springframework.core.task.TaskExecutor" ref="taskExecutor" />
     <constructor-arg type="package.name.ClassWithMethodToFire" ref="classWithMethodToFireBean"/>
</bean>

<bean id="taskExecutor" class="org.springframework.scheduling.concurrent.ThreadPoolTaskExecutor">
     <property name="corePoolSize" value="5" />
     <property name="maxPoolSize" value="10" />
     <property name="queueCapacity" value="25" />
</bean>