Just in general, you need to encapsulate your units of work in a Runnable or java.util.concurrent.Callable and execute them via java.util.concurrent.Executor (or org.springframework.core.task.TaskExecutor). This allows each unit of work to be executed separately, typically in an asynchronous fashion (depending on the implementation of the Executor).
So for your specific problem, you could do something like this:
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.concurrent.Callable;
import java.util.concurrent.Executor;
import java.util.concurrent.FutureTask;
import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpGet;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.BasicResponseHandler;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.ui.Model;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
@Controller
public class MyController {
//inject this
private Executor executor;
@RequestMapping("/your/path/here")
public String myMVCControllerGETdataMethod(Model model) {
//define all async requests and give them to injected Executor
List<GetRequestTask> tasks = new ArrayList<GetRequestTask>();
tasks.add(new GetRequestTask("http://api/data?type=1", this.executor));
tasks.add(new GetRequestTask("http://api/data?type=2", this.executor));
//...
//do other work here
//...
//now wait for all async tasks to complete
while(!tasks.isEmpty()) {
for(Iterator<GetRequestTask> it = tasks.iterator(); it.hasNext();) {
GetRequestTask task = it.next();
if(task.isDone()) {
String request = task.getRequest();
String response = task.getResponse();
//PUT YOUR CODE HERE
//possibly aggregate request and response in Map<String,String>
//or do something else with request and response
it.remove();
}
}
//avoid tight loop in "main" thread
if(!tasks.isEmpty()) Thread.sleep(100);
}
//now you have all responses for all async requests
//the following from your original code
//note: you should probably pass the responses from above
//to this next method (to keep your controller stateless)
String results = doWorkwithMultipleDataReturned();
model.addAttribute(results, results);
return "index";
}
//abstraction to wrap Callable and Future
class GetRequestTask {
private GetRequestWork work;
private FutureTask<String> task;
public GetRequestTask(String url, Executor executor) {
this.work = new GetRequestWork(url);
this.task = new FutureTask<String>(work);
executor.execute(this.task);
}
public String getRequest() {
return this.work.getUrl();
}
public boolean isDone() {
return this.task.isDone();
}
public String getResponse() {
try {
return this.task.get();
} catch(Exception e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
}
}
//Callable representing actual HTTP GET request
class GetRequestWork implements Callable<String> {
private final String url;
public GetRequestWork(String url) {
this.url = url;
}
public String getUrl() {
return this.url;
}
public String call() throws Exception {
return new DefaultHttpClient().execute(new HttpGet(getUrl()), new BasicResponseHandler());
}
}
}
Note that this code has not been tested.
For your Executor implementation, check out Spring's TaskExecutor and task:executor namespace. You probably want a reusable pool of threads for this use-case (instead of creating a new thread every time).
