Managing the application threads

Threads and multi-threaded programming is not a trivial subject. But some application developers find themselves having to start their own threads as part of their application.

I'll start this post off saying that using unmanaged threads is never a good thing. When using threads developers should be looking at how to manage all their threads in their application. Never exit the application without terminating all of your threads. Why would we need to do this?

An interesting problem is when an application is stopped (not the JVM/app-server but just the application), a new version is deployed, but the restart fails because there are still threads hanging around from the previous version of the applications and older versions of the same classes. I never would have imagined this problem occurring but I can see that if the application lost track of its threads that it would not be able to close them when it shut down.

Java provides the capability to manage all the application threads by using thread groups. When creating a thread and assigning the application's thread to a thread group all the application has to do is capture the "application stop event" and use the stop method of the thread group thereby stopping all the threads in the thread group.

The beauty of this solution is that the application can reliably manage all of the threads it creates though a single interface. It is also portable which means your application will work with any application server.