Equinox/Futures

Introduction

With Equinox version 3.5M5, a new plugin has been introduced org.eclipse.equinox.concurrent. Futures are a way to provide support for easier handling of concurrency and synchronization within multi-threaded and/or distributed applications. See Wikipedia article on Futures for some technical background information.

Contents of Equinox Concurrent Bundle

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Examples of Using Futures

Here is an API that would normally return an Integer as the result of some synchronous computation

// foo() may be a long-running operation, and if so will block in order to 
// synchronously return the result
Integer result = foo();

With futures, foo() could instead return an IFuture, and thereby guarantee that foo() would not block indefinitely.

// foo will return the future immediately and operation will complete
// asynchronously
IFuture future = foo();
// do other things while operation is completed asynchronously
...
Integer result = (Integer) future.get();