Java’s Synchronized Collections
Java’s Collection framework is one of the foundational components of Java platform. Collections in Java represent a group of objects and the framework provides several interfaces and implementations to work with these collections. With such a rich framework at disposal, developers can focus on what matters the most!
With the advent of multi-threaded programming, the need for thread-safe collections grew. It is when Synchronized Collections were added to Java’s Collection framework. Let us understand what makes Synchronized Collections thread-safe and what are some things we should keep in-mind while using them.
How does Synchronized Collections ensure thread-safety?
Synchronized collections achieves thread-safety by enforcing synchronization on each of its publicly available method. In addition to that, it ensures that its internal state is never published. Thus, the only way to modify a collection is via its public synchronized methods!
Think of synchronized collections as plain unsynchronised collections plus state encapsulation and synchronized public methods.
Since every public method of a synchronized collection is guarded by the same (intrinsic) lock, no two threads can modify/read the collection at once. This ensures that the collection always…
