Working with threads is usually ranked as one of the least intuitive and painful tasks in programming. This is such an error prone task that some platforms/languages took the route of avoiding threads entirely. I needed to convert some code to work on a separate thread but I still wanted the ability to communicate and transfer data from that thread.
This is possible in Java but non-trivial, the thing is that this is relatively easy to do in Codename One with tools such as callSerially I can let arbitrary code run on the EDT. Why not offer that to any random thread?
That’s why I created EasyThread which takes some of the concepts of Codeame One’s threading and makes them more accessible to an arbitrary thread. This way you can move things like resource loading into a separate thread and easily synchronize the data back into the EDT as needed…
Easy thread can be created like this:
EasyThread e = EasyThread.start("ThreadName");You can just send a task to the thread using:
e.run(() -> doThisOnTheThread());But it gets better, say you want to return a value:
e.run((success) -> success.onSuccess(doThisOnTheThread()), (myResult) -> onEDTGotResult(myRsult));Lets break that down… We ran the thread with the success callback on the new thread then the callback got invoked on the EDT as a result. So this code (success) → success.onSuccess(doThisOnTheThread()) ran off the EDT in the thread and when we invoked the onSuccess callback it sent it asynchronously to the EDT here: (myResult) → onEDTGotResult(myRsult).
These asynchronous calls make things a bit painful to wade thru so instead I chose to wrap them in a simplified synchronous version:
EasyThread e = EasyThread.start("Hi");
int result = e.run(() -> {
System.out.println("This is a thread");
return 3;
});There are a few other variants like runAndWait and there is a kill() method which stops a thread and releases its resources.
2 Comments
That’s pretty slick!
Really good, but perhaps in the future a method similar to interrupt() could be added to cancel all the pending tasks (since kill() doesn’t cancel pending tasks)