Re: How to use wait() and notifyAll() in simple container object

From:
kilian heckrodt <kilianheckrodt@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Sat, 16 Dec 2006 04:57:09 +0100
Message-ID:
<elvqqv$iv4$03$1@news.t-online.com>
Bryan wrote:

Hello all,

I have a simple container object that has a get and set method for a
variable it contains. Multiple threads will potentially be accessing
the container object to get and set the variable. Can anyone tell me
what's wrong with the code I have below? It's not working for me...

public class Container {

    private boolean value = false;
    private boolean available = false;

    public Container(boolean value) {
        this.value = value;
    }

    public synchronized boolean get() {
        while (available == false) {
            try {
                wait();
            } catch (InterruptedException ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); }
        }
        available = false;
        notifyAll();
        return value;
    }

    public synchronized void set(boolean value) {
        while (available == true) {
            try {
                wait();
            } catch (InterruptedException ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); }
        }
        this.value = value;
        available = true;
        notifyAll();
    }
}

I found most of the above code in a tutorial on the web --
http://www.janeg.ca/scjp/threads/synchronized.html -- but like I said
it's not working for me. Here's how I'm testing it:

I have a class that extends TimerTask and is called every 5 seconds to
randomize the value by calling the set method and passing it a random
boolean value obtained from Random.nextBoolean(). I have it set up to
print to the console each time it changes the value... it prints one
time but never prints again. Any suggestions as to why this isn't
working for me?

Thanks!


Hmmm... the example at the website looks ok, but i wonder whether you
misunderstood its purpose, i.e. how the consumer-producer scenario works.

The idea is that you _cannot_ set ("produce") a new value _before_ the
old is consumed. That means to call set for a 2nd time and having an
effect, you need to call get() before, which consumes the value and lets
you set/produce another later.
The consumer-producer scenario is to avoid race conditions and to make
sure no information gets overwritten by accident (a value that is
replaced by another via a set() call before it was consumed by a get() call.
This is a typical scenario for a multithreaded buffer, where you want to
avoid that its content gets overwritten by incoming new data before it
was read, since that would mean data loss

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