JAVA: what is the best way for scheduling Thread works?

Question

I need to make a Thread which starts it's work at the time the program runs and dies when the program is closed. this Thread is going to check something every 1 minute ones.

what is the best way for this scheduling, using Thread.sleep() or using a Timer or what?

and how to use that, how can I tell execute this `Runnable` every 1 minute for example ? — Soheil, Jan 24 '13 at 20:46
Look at the Javadoc. `ScheduledExecutorService` has a [method](http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/ScheduledExecutorService.html#scheduleAtFixedRate(java.lang.Runnable,%20long,%20long,%20java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit)) that lets you do exactly that. — Louis Wasserman, Jan 24 '13 at 20:47
@Soheil look at the java docs for ScheduledExecutorService, there's a choice between "fixed rate" (start every minute) and "fixed delay" (start one minute after the last execution finished). — Ian Roberts, Jan 24 '13 at 20:48
I think the best is to use a TimerTask, take a look in this post http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14454063/how-to-make-a-timer/14454211#14454211 — fmodos, Jan 24 '13 at 20:49
@fmodos `Timer`s and `TimerTask`s are for dispatching timed events to the Swing GUI thread, not really general-purpose. (Of course it might be the OP wants to do exactly that, I'm just clarifying.) — millimoose, Jan 24 '13 at 20:52
@fmodos I was thinking about that, too but now I think using `Executors.newScheduledThreadPool` will be better — Soheil, Jan 24 '13 at 20:53
Executors appeared first in 1.5. Timer was the fancy way of doing it before that (starting in 1.3). There is another Timer class as part of Swing. — Ralf H, Jan 24 '13 at 20:58

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 24 '13 at 20:50

You've not provided any code, but there's loads of examples about for this sort of thing, here's one:

import static java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit.*;
class BeeperControl {
private final ScheduledExecutorService scheduler =
       Executors.newScheduledThreadPool(1);

    public void beepForAnHour() {
        final Runnable beeper = new Runnable() {
                public void run() { System.out.println("beep"); }
            };
        final ScheduledFuture<?> beeperHandle =
            scheduler.scheduleAtFixedRate(beeper, 10, 10, SECONDS);
        scheduler.schedule(new Runnable() {
                public void run() { beeperHandle.cancel(true); }
            }, 60 * 60, SECONDS);
    }
 }

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/concurrent/ScheduledExecutorService.html#scheduleAtFixedRate(java.lang.Runnable

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 24 '13 at 20:51

Create a ScheduledExecutorService throught Executors#newSingleThreadScheduledExecutor()
Schedule your thread with ScheduleExecutorService#scheduleAtFixedRate
At the end of your application, call ScheduledExecutorService#shutdownNow()

So you will have something like

public class Application {
     private final ScheduledExecutorService executor;
     private final Runnable task;

     public Application(ScheduledExecutorService executor, Runnable task) {
         this.executor = executor;
         this.task = task;
     }

     public void init() {
         executor.scheduleAtFixedRate(task, 0, 60, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
     }
     public void shutdown() {
         executor.shutdownNow();
     }
}

and you will create your application with something like

 // ....
 Application app = new Application(Executors.newSingleThreadScheduledExecutor(), task);
 app.init();
 // ....
 // at end
 app.shutdown();

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 15 '13 at 11:39

To make a Thread which starts it's work at the time the program runs and dies when the program is closed, mark this thread as a daemon thread:

Thread myThread=new Thread();
myThread.setDaemon(true);
myThread.start(); // forget about it, no need to explicitly kill it

JAVA: what is the best way for scheduling Thread works?

3 Answers3