Synchronous Vs Asynchronous Programming

Key differences between the programming models

Asynchronous Vs Synchronous

Introduction

Single processor systems dominated during the early days of computing. The synchronous programming model was adopted in many early programming languages. With the advancements in hardware, there was a need to develop better programming models. A robust model that would fully utilize all the resources would be the most suitable one. This gave birth to Asynchronous programming.

For beginners, it’s difficult to understand the difference between the two programming models. In this write-up, I’ll attempt to simplify & explain the difference in layman terms. We will also take a look at a simple illustration in Java. We will understand APIs provided in Java for asynchronous programming.

Real-World Analogy

Before diving deep into programming models, we will first take a look at synchronous & asynchronous systems.

Supermarket as a Synchronous system

We all have been in supermarket stores to buy our daily items. Every person collects…