So I have a long running process that I want to encapsulate as a Runnable and dispatch it in a thread. To be more specific, I have a POST web service that creates a file in the file system but the creation of the file can take a very long time.
In the resource method of my web service, I want to be able to dispatch a thread to do the file creation and return the status 200. I don’t think I can just do Thread.join because this would mean that the current thread would have to wait for the file creation thread to finish. Instead, I want to join the file creation thread to the main thread. Question is, how do I get the main thread in java?
I am not sure whether I get you right. Here is what I understood:
You want to preform a possibly long running operation (file creation)
you do not want you service method to block while that task is exectued
you want the task executed in a thread that exists outside the boundary/lifetime of the single request.
Am I right so far?
If sou really recommend you look into the newer concepts in java.util.concurrent. The concepts described there should give you enogh information tackkle this
Basic credo: Don’t think in threads, think in tasks.
General Book recommendation: Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz