Java executors: wait for task termination.

Question

I need to submit a number of task and then wait for them until all results are available. Each of them adds a String to a Vector(that is synchronized by default). Then I need to start a new task for each result in the Vector but I need to do this only when all the previous tasks have stopped doing their job.

I want to use Java Executor, in particular I tried using Executors.newFixedThreadPool(100) in order to use a fixed number of thread (I have a variable number of task that can be 10 or 500) but I'm new with executors and I don't know how to wait for task termination. This is something like a pseudocode of what my program needs to do:

ExecutorService e = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(100);
while(true){

/*do something*/

for(...){
<start task>
}

<wait for all task termination>

for each String in result{
<start task>
}

<wait for all task termination>
}

I can't do a e.shutdown because I'm in a while(true) and I need to reuse the executorService...

Can you help me? Can you suggest me a guide/book about java executors?

Answer 1

The ExecutorService gives you a mechanism to execute multiple tasks simultaneously and get a collection of Future objects back (representing the asynchronous computation of the task).

Collection<Callable<?>> tasks = new LinkedList<Callable<?>>();
//populate tasks
for (Future<?> f : executorService.invokeAll(tasks)) { //invokeAll() blocks until ALL tasks submitted to executor complete
    f.get(); 
}

If you have Runnables instead of Callables, you can easily turn a Runnable into a Callable<Object> using the method:

Callable<?> c = Executors.callable(runnable);