Executors

In all of the previous examples, there's a close connection between the task being done by a new thread, as defined by its Runnable object, and the thread itself, as defined by a Thread object. This works well for small applications, but in large-scale applications, it makes sense to separate thread management and creation from the rest of the application. Objects that encapsulate these functions are known as executors. The following subsections describe executors in detail.

• Executor Interfaces define the three executor object types.
• Thread Pools are the most common kind of executor implementation.
• Fork/Join is a framework (new in JDK 7) for taking advantage of multiple processors.