I created a java thread pool using
dbChangeService = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor();
I have implemented a runnable interface and added it to
Future future = dbChangeService.submit(dbChgProcessor);
when I do future.isDone() it returns false which is understandable because I am checking immediately after submitting.
What is the correct way of using Future.isDone() method so that it can produce meaningful results.
PS: I don't want to use Future.get() which is a blocking call.
Instead of simply doing future.isDone(), you should poll for it to be true. E.g.
while(!future.isDone())
{
log.info("future not done yet, waiting before retrying...");
Thread.sleep(300);
}
Object result = future.get();
This still is still kind of blocking, so you probably wanna do it on another thread that will notify your main tread using a lock object. Or even better why not use CompletableFuture? See resources here & here.
So first of all let me clarify that:
Future.isDone() tells us if the executor has finished processing the task.
If the task is complete, it will return true otherwise, it returns false.
I would suggest you to use CompletableFuture, something like:
CompletableFuture.supplyAsync(() -> {
...
});
This will return a CompletableFuture as well.
As I said in the comments, a CompletableFuture provides a broad set of methods for creating multiple Futures, chaining, and combining. It also has comprehensive exception handling support
Check a full guide with CompletableFuture examples here
Are there any advantages of processing result using a ListenableFuture when submitting a tasks to ExecutorService instead of doing it the plain old java way by simply calling a function that processes the results?
Future:
Future<ScanResult> result = threadPoolExecutor.submit(
new Callable<ScanResult>() {
//long running process to get scanResult
return scanResult;
});
ScanResult sr = result.get();
OR use guava ListenableFuture to prevent manually get() calling.
Plain Java Way:
threadPoolExecutor.submit(new Callable<Void>() {
#Override
public Void call() throws Exception {
//long running process to get scanResult
jobCompleted(scanResult);
return null;
}
});
I have not worked on Guava Concurrency or ListenableFuture but I think the main advantage is generic event based program design which is easier to understand and visualize than manually triggering code based on events.
Future.get() is a blocking method so you are anyhow blocked till Callable is complete so you are coupling two independent code execution paths into a single execution path. Adding listener decouples them and couples them logically based on event.
Also as per github link, it is strongly advised to use it and I guess reason for it might be additional services supported by ListenableFuture that might not be present in plain Future.
Hope it helps !!
I've got a question about CompletableFuture and its possible usage for lazy computations.
It seems like it is a great substitute for RunnableFuture for this task since it is possible to easily create task chains and to have total control of each chain link. Still I found that it is very hard to control when exactly does the computation take place.
If I just create a CompletableFuture with supplyAssync method or something like that, it is OK. It waits patiently for me to call get or join method to compute. But if I try to make an actual chain with whenCompose, handle or any other method, the evaluation starts immediately, which is very frustrating.
Of course, I can always place some blocker task at the start of the chain and release the block when I am ready to begin calculation, but it seems a bit ugly solution. Does anybody know how to control when does CompletableFuture actually run.
CompletableFuture is a push-design, i.e. results are pushed down to dependent tasks as soon as they become available. This also means side-chains that are not in themselves consumed still get executed, which can have side-effects.
What you want is a pull-design where ancestors would only be pulled in as their data is consumed.
This would be a fundamentally different design because side-effects of non-consumed trees would never happen.
Of course with enough contortions CF could be made to do what you want, but you should look into the fork-join framework instead which allows you to only run the computations you depend on instead of pushing down results.
There's a conceptual difference between RunnableFuture and CompletableFuture that you're missing here.
RunnableFuture implementations take a task as input and hold onto it. It runs the task when you call the run method.
A CompletableFuture does not hold onto a task. It only knows about the result of a task. It has three states: complete, incomplete, and completed exceptionally (failed).
CompletableFuture.supplyAsync is a factory method that gives you an incomplete CompletableFuture. It also schedules a task which, when it completes, will pass its result to the CompletableFuture's complete method. In other words, the future that supplyAsync hands you doesn't know anything about the task, and can't control when the task runs.
To use a CompletableFuture in the way you describe, you would need to create a subclass:
public class RunnableCompletableFuture<T> extends CompletableFuture<T> implements RunnableFuture<T> {
private final Callable<T> task;
public RunnableCompletableFuture(Callable<T> task) {
this.task = task;
}
#Override
public void run() {
try {
complete(task.call());
} catch (Exception e) {
completeExceptionally(e);
}
}
}
A simple way of dealing with your problem is wrapping your CompletableFuture in something with a lazy nature. You could use a Supplier or even Java 8 Stream.
it is late, but how about using constructor for first CompletableFuture in the chain?
CompletableFuture<Object> cf = new CompletableFuture<>();
// compose the chain
cf.thenCompose(sometask_here);
// later starts the chain with
cf.complete(anInputObject);
I want to achieve what the following pseudo code illustrates:
int functionA() {
Future res;
// ...
setCallbackForSomething(new Callback() {
public void onCall() {
// ...
res = 5;
}
});
// ...
return doSomethingElse(res.get());
}
i.e. the functionA blocks until the callback has been called, then processes the result and returns something.
Is something like that possible with Future? The usual usage,
Future res = executor.submit(...);
...
res.get()
does not seem to work here. I also cannot change the fact that I have to set the callback like this.
Future has limited features. From the javadoc
A Future represents the result of an asynchronous computation. Methods
are provided to check if the computation is complete, to wait for its
completion, and to retrieve the result of the computation.
It only exposes read operations (except for cancel). You won't be able to achieve what you want with Future.
Instead, since Java 8, you can use CompletableFuture
A Future that may be explicitly completed (setting its value and
status), and may be used as a CompletionStage, supporting dependent
functions and actions that trigger upon its completion.
You initialize the CompletableFuture
CompletableFuture<Integer> res = new CompletableFuture<>();
and complete it either normally or exceptionally
setCallbackForSomething(new Callback() {
public void onCall() {
// ...
res.complete(5); // or handle exception
}
});
Instead of calling get, you can chain a completion task on the CompletableFuture to call doSomethingElse.
res.thenAccept(value -> doSomethingElse(value));
Though you can still call get if you want to, blocking until the future is completed.
Before Java 8, the Guava library provided SettableFuture to achieve the "set" part of a promised value. But it's also a ListenableFuture so you can chain other operations on completion.
I am playing with Java 8 completable futures. I have the following code:
CountDownLatch waitLatch = new CountDownLatch(1);
CompletableFuture<?> future = CompletableFuture.runAsync(() -> {
try {
System.out.println("Wait");
waitLatch.await(); //cancel should interrupt
System.out.println("Done");
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
System.out.println("Interrupted");
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}
});
sleep(10); //give it some time to start (ugly, but works)
future.cancel(true);
System.out.println("Cancel called");
assertTrue(future.isCancelled());
assertTrue(future.isDone());
sleep(100); //give it some time to finish
Using runAsync I schedule execution of a code that waits on a latch. Next I cancel the future, expecting an interrupted exception to be thrown inside. But it seems that the thread remains blocked on the await call and the InterruptedException is never thrown even though the future is canceled (assertions pass). An equivalent code using ExecutorService works as expected. Is it a bug in the CompletableFuture or in my example?
When you call CompletableFuture#cancel, you only stop the downstream part of the chain. Upstream part, i. e. something that will eventually call complete(...) or completeExceptionally(...), doesn't get any signal that the result is no more needed.
What are those 'upstream' and 'downstream' things?
Let's consider the following code:
CompletableFuture
.supplyAsync(() -> "hello") //1
.thenApply(s -> s + " world!") //2
.thenAccept(s -> System.out.println(s)); //3
Here, the data flows from top to bottom - from being created by supplier, through being modified by function, to being consumed by println. The part above particular step is called upstream, and the part below is downstream. E. g. steps 1 and 2 are upstream for step 3.
Here's what happens behind the scenes. This is not precise, rather it's a convenient mind model of what's going on.
Supplier (step 1) is being executed (inside the JVM's common ForkJoinPool).
The result of the supplier is then being passed by complete(...) to the next CompletableFuture downstream.
Upon receiving the result, that CompletableFuture invokes next step - a function (step 2) which takes in previous step result and returns something that will be passed further, to the downstream CompletableFuture's complete(...).
Upon receiving the step 2 result, step 3 CompletableFuture invokes the consumer, System.out.println(s). After consumer is finished, the downstream CompletableFuture will receive it's value, (Void) null
As we can see, each CompletableFuture in this chain has to know who are there downstream waiting for the value to be passed to their's complete(...) (or completeExceptionally(...)). But the CompletableFuture don't have to know anything about it's upstream (or upstreams - there might be several).
Thus, calling cancel() upon step 3 doesn't abort steps 1 and 2, because there's no link from step 3 to step 2.
It is supposed that if you're using CompletableFuture then your steps are small enough so that there's no harm if a couple of extra steps will get executed.
If you want cancellation to be propagated upstream, you have two options:
Implement this yourself - create a dedicated CompletableFuture (name it like cancelled) which is checked after every step (something like step.applyToEither(cancelled, Function.identity()))
Use reactive stack like RxJava 2, ProjectReactor/Flux or Akka Streams
Apparently, it's intentional. The Javadoc for the method CompletableFuture::cancel states:
[Parameters:] mayInterruptIfRunning - this value has no effect in this implementation because interrupts are not used to control processing.
Interestingly, the method ForkJoinTask::cancel uses almost the same wording for the parameter mayInterruptIfRunning.
I have a guess on this issue:
interruption is intended to be used with blocking operations, like sleep, wait or I/O operations,
but neither CompletableFuture nor ForkJoinTask are intended to be used with blocking operations.
Instead of blocking, a CompletableFuture should create a new CompletionStage, and cpu-bound tasks are a prerequisite for the fork-join model. So, using interruption with either of them would defeat their purpose. And on the other hand, it might increase complexity, that's not required if used as intended.
If you actually want to be able to cancel a task, then you have to use Future itself (e.g. as returned by ExecutorService.submit(Callable<T>), not CompletableFuture. As pointed out in the answer by nosid, CompletableFuture completely ignores any call to cancel(true).
My suspicion is that the JDK team did not implement interruption because:
Interruption was always hacky, difficult for people to understand, and difficult to work with. The Java I/O system is not even interruptible, despite calls to InputStream.read() being blocking calls! (And the JDK team have no plans to make the standard I/O system interruptible again, like it was in the very early Java days.)
The JDK team have been trying very hard to phase out old broken APIs from the early Java days, such as Object.finalize(), Object.wait(), Thread.stop(), etc. I believe Thread.interrupt() is considered to be in the category of things that must be eventually deprecated and replaced. Therefore, newer APIs (like ForkJoinPool and CompletableFuture) are already not supporting it.
CompletableFuture was designed for building DAG-structured pipelines of operations, similar to the Java Stream API. It's very dificult to succinctly describe how interruption of one node of a dataflow DAG should affect execution in the rest of the DAG. (Should all concurrent tasks be canceled immediately, when any node is interrupted?)
I suspect the JDK team just didn't want to deal with getting interruption right, given the levels of internal complexity that the JDK and libraries have reached these days. (The internals of the lambda system -- ugh.)
One very hacky way around this would be to have each CompletableFuture export a reference to itself to an externally-visible AtomicReference, then the Thread reference could be interrupted directly when needed from another external thread. Or if you start all the tasks using your own ExecutorService, in your own ThreadPool, you can manually interrupt any or all the threads that were started, even if CompletableFuture refuses to trigger interruption via cancel(true). (Note though that CompletableFuture lambdas cannot throw checked exceptions, so if you have an interruptible wait in a CompletableFuture, you'll have to re-throw as an unchecked exception.)
More simply, you could just declare an AtomicReference<Boolean> cancel = new AtomicReference<>() in an external scope, and periodically check this flag from inside each CompletableFuture task's lambda.
You could also try setting up a DAG of Future instances rather than a DAG of CompletableFuture instances, that way you can exactly specify how exceptions and interruption/cancellation in any one task should affect the other currently-running tasks. I show how to do this in my example code in my question here, and it works well, but it's a lot of boilerplate.
You need an alternative implementation of CompletionStage to accomplish true thread interruption. I've just released a small library that serves exactly this purpose - https://github.com/vsilaev/tascalate-concurrent
The call to wait will still block even if Future.cancel(..) is called. As mentioned by others the CompletableFuture will not use interrupts to cancel the task.
According to the javadoc of CompletableFuture.cancel(..):
mayInterruptIfRunning this value has no effect in this implementation because interrupts are not used to control processing.
Even if the implementation would cause an interrupt, you would still need a blocking operation in order to cancel the task or check the status via Thread.interrupted().
Instead of interrupting the Thread, which might not be always easy to do, you may have check points in your operation where you can gracefully terminate the current task. This can be done in a loop over some elements that will be processed or you check before each step of the operation for the cancel status and throw an CancellationException yourself.
The tricky part is to get a reference of the CompletableFuture within the task in order to call Future.isCancelled(). Here is an example of how it can be done:
public abstract class CancelableTask<T> {
private CompletableFuture<T> task;
private T run() {
try {
return compute();
} catch (Throwable e) {
task.completeExceptionally(e);
}
return null;
}
protected abstract T compute() throws Exception;
protected boolean isCancelled() {
Future<T> future = task;
return future != null && future.isCancelled();
}
public Future<T> start() {
synchronized (this) {
if (task != null) throw new IllegalStateException("Task already started.");
task = new CompletableFuture<>();
}
return task.completeAsync(this::run);
}
}
Edit: Here the improved CancelableTask version as a static factory:
public static <T> CompletableFuture<T> supplyAsync(Function<Future<T>, T> operation) {
CompletableFuture<T> future = new CompletableFuture<>();
return future.completeAsync(() -> operation.apply(future));
}
here is the test method:
#Test
void testFuture() throws InterruptedException {
CountDownLatch started = new CountDownLatch(1);
CountDownLatch done = new CountDownLatch(1);
AtomicInteger counter = new AtomicInteger();
Future<Object> future = supplyAsync(task -> {
started.countDown();
while (!task.isCancelled()) {
System.out.println("Count: " + counter.getAndIncrement());
}
System.out.println("Task cancelled");
done.countDown();
return null;
});
// wait until the task is started
assertTrue(started.await(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS));
future.cancel(true);
System.out.println("Cancel called");
assertTrue(future.isCancelled());
assertTrue(future.isDone());
assertTrue(done.await(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS));
}
If you really want to use interrupts in addition to the CompletableFuture, then you can pass a custom Executor to CompletableFuture.completeAsync(..) where you create your own Thread, override cancel(..) in the CompletableFuture and interrupt your Thread.
The CancellationException is part of the internal ForkJoin cancel routine. The exception will come out when you retrieve the result of future:
try { future.get(); }
catch (Exception e){
System.out.println(e.toString());
}
Took a while to see this in a debugger. The JavaDoc is not that clear on what is happening or what you should expect.