Question

What I’m trying to do is have a thread write a message it received from its parent thread to an OutputStream, listen to an InputStream for the reply and then notify the parent thread with the reply. I wrote two test classes that do something similar but simpler in different ways.
Method 1 only works when the "before loop" debug statement is uncommented, method 2 only prints the "message from child" debug statements. What am I doing wrong?

Method 1

public class Parent {
    private static int out = 0;
    private static int in = 0;

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        final Object locker = new Object();
        Thread t = new Thread(new Runnable() {          
            @Override
            public void run() {
                while (true) {
                    synchronized (locker) {
                        try {
                            locker.wait();
                            System.out.println("Message from parent " + out);
                            in = out + 10;
                            locker.notify();
                        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                            e.printStackTrace();
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        });
        t.start();

        System.out.println("before loop");
        while (out < 10) {
            synchronized (locker) {
                locker.notify();
                try {
                    locker.wait();
                    out++;
                    System.out.println("Message from child " + in);
                } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }               
            }   
        }       
    }
}

Method 2

public class Parent {

    /**
     * @param args
     * @throws InterruptedException 
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) throws InterruptedException {
        final BlockingQueue<Integer> q = new ArrayBlockingQueue<Integer>(1);

        Thread t = new Thread(new Runnable() {          
            @Override
            public void run() {
                while (true) {
                    try {
                        Integer i = q.take();               
                        System.out.println("Message from parent: " + i.intValue());
                        q.put(i.intValue() + 10);
                    } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                        // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                        e.printStackTrace();
                    }
                }               
            }
        });

        for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
            q.put(i);
            Integer j =  q.take();
            System.out.println("Message from child: " + j);
        }
    }

}

Answer 1

The Java API already offers that functionality; do you have a valid reason to reinvent the wheel?

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    // start a worker thread
    ExecutorService exec = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(1);

    // ask the worker thread to execute a task (
    Future<String> future = exec.submit(() -> {
        Thread.sleep(500); // simulate waiting for I/O
        return "hello from child";
    });

    // get the return value from the worker thread (waiting until it is available)
    String greeting = future.get();
    System.out.println(greeting);

    // terminate the worker thread (otherwise, the thread will wait for more work)
    exec.shutdown();
}