This month’s Effective Concurrency column, “Prefer Using Active Objects Instead of Naked Threads,” is now live on DDJ’s website.

From the article:

… Active objects dramatically improve our ability to reason about our thread’s code and operation by giving us higher-level abstractions and idioms that raise the semantic level of our program and let us express our intent more directly. As with all good patterns, we also get better vocabulary to talk about our design. Note that active objects aren’t a novelty: UML and various libraries have provided support for active classes. Some actor-based languages already have variations of this pattern baked into the language itself; but fortunately, we aren’t limited to using only such languages to get the benefits of active objects.

This article will show how to implement the pattern, including a reusable helper to automate the common parts, in any of the popular mainstream languages and threading environments, including C++, C#/.NET, Java, and C/Pthreads.

I hope you enjoy it. Finally, here are links to previous Effective Concurrency columns:

1 The Pillars of Concurrency (Aug 2007)

2 How Much Scalability Do You Have or Need? (Sep 2007)

3 Use Critical Sections (Preferably Locks) to Eliminate Races (Oct 2007)

4 Apply Critical Sections Consistently (Nov 2007)

5 Avoid Calling Unknown Code While Inside a Critical Section (Dec 2007)

6 Use Lock Hierarchies to Avoid Deadlock (Jan 2008)

7 Break Amdahl’s Law! (Feb 2008)

8 Going Superlinear (Mar 2008)

9 Super Linearity and the Bigger Machine (Apr 2008)

10 Interrupt Politely (May 2008)

11 Maximize Locality, Minimize Contention (Jun 2008)

12 Choose Concurrency-Friendly Data Structures (Jul 2008)

13 The Many Faces of Deadlock (Aug 2008)

14 Lock-Free Code: A False Sense of Security (Sep 2008)

15 Writing Lock-Free Code: A Corrected Queue (Oct 2008)

16 Writing a Generalized Concurrent Queue (Nov 2008)

17 Understanding Parallel Performance (Dec 2008)

18 Measuring Parallel Performance: Optimizing a Concurrent Queue (Jan 2009)

19 volatile vs. volatile (Feb 2009)

20 Sharing Is the Root of All Contention (Mar 2009)

21 Use Threads Correctly = Isolation + Asynchronous Messages (Apr 2009)

22 Use Thread Pools Correctly: Keep Tasks Short and Nonblocking (Apr 2009)

23 Eliminate False Sharing (May 2009)

24 Break Up and Interleave Work to Keep Threads Responsive (Jun 2009)

25 The Power of “In Progress” (Jul 2009)

26 Design for Manycore Systems (Aug 2009)

27 Avoid Exposing Concurrency – Hide It Inside Synchronous Methods (Oct 2009)

28 Prefer structured lifetimes – local, nested, bounded, deterministic (Nov 2009)

29 Prefer Futures to Baked-In “Async APIs” (Jan 2010)

30 Associate Mutexes with Data to Prevent Races (May 2010)

31 Prefer Using Active Objects Instead of Naked Threads (June 2010)