thread safe classes...

[Chetan Dodiya]

what is thread safe???
when a class is said to be thread safe???

[Brian Legg]

Thread safe means that a piece of code can only be accessed by one Thread at a time. This uses the synchronized keyword.

If a class is said to be "thread safe" it means that all the methods in that class are synchronized, or again, can only be accessed by one Thread at a time.

Search on multithreading and synchronization for more information.

EDIT: Remember that a class can not be defined as synchronized, just the methods in the class.
[ November 12, 2008: Message edited by: Brian Legg ]

[Henry Wong]

Thread safe means that a piece of code can only be accessed by one Thread at a time. This uses the synchronized keyword.

I am not sure if I agree with this... IMO, Thread Safe means that the class can be accessed by multiple threads, and it will still work as documented. It could be achieved by synchronization. It could be achieved by segmenting data. It could be achieved by optimistic locking. It could even be achieved by documenting that it will throw an exception condition, under certain situations.

Henry

[Brian Legg]

I'll have to concede to the man who wrote the book on threads.