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Java FutureTask Example Program

Published on August 3, 2022
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By Pankaj

Java FutureTask Example Program

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Sometime back I wrote a post about Java Callable Future interfaces that we can use to get the concurrent processing benefits of threads as well as they are capable of returning value to the calling program. FutureTask is base concrete implementation of Future interface and provides asynchronous processing. It contains the methods to start and cancel a task and also methods that can return the state of the FutureTask as whether it’s completed or cancelled. We need a callable object to create a future task and then we can use Java Thread Pool Executor to process these asynchronously. Let’s see the example of FutureTask with a simple program. Since FutureTask requires a callable object, we will create a simple Callable implementation.

package com.journaldev.threads;

import java.util.concurrent.Callable;

public class MyCallable implements Callable<String> {

	private long waitTime;
	
	public MyCallable(int timeInMillis){
		this.waitTime=timeInMillis;
	}
	@Override
	public String call() throws Exception {
		Thread.sleep(waitTime);
        //return the thread name executing this callable task
        return Thread.currentThread().getName();
	}

}

Here is an example of FutureTask method and it’s showing commonly used methods of FutureTask.

package com.journaldev.threads;

import java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException;
import java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService;
import java.util.concurrent.Executors;
import java.util.concurrent.FutureTask;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeoutException;

public class FutureTaskExample {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		MyCallable callable1 = new MyCallable(1000);
		MyCallable callable2 = new MyCallable(2000);

		FutureTask<String> futureTask1 = new FutureTask<String>(callable1);
		FutureTask<String> futureTask2 = new FutureTask<String>(callable2);

		ExecutorService executor = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(2);
		executor.execute(futureTask1);
		executor.execute(futureTask2);
		
		while (true) {
			try {
				if(futureTask1.isDone() && futureTask2.isDone()){
					System.out.println("Done");
					//shut down executor service
					executor.shutdown();
					return;
				}
				
				if(!futureTask1.isDone()){
				//wait indefinitely for future task to complete
				System.out.println("FutureTask1 output="+futureTask1.get());
				}
				
				System.out.println("Waiting for FutureTask2 to complete");
				String s = futureTask2.get(200L, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);
				if(s !=null){
					System.out.println("FutureTask2 output="+s);
				}
			} catch (InterruptedException | ExecutionException e) {
				e.printStackTrace();
			}catch(TimeoutException e){
				//do nothing
			}
		}
		
	}

}

When we run above program, you will notice that it doesn’t print anything for sometime because get() method of FutureTask waits for the task to get completed and then returns the output object. There is an overloaded method also to wait for only specified amount of time and we are using it for futureTask2. Also notice the use of isDone() method to make sure program gets terminated once all the tasks are executed. Output of above program will be:

FutureTask1 output=pool-1-thread-1
Waiting for FutureTask2 to complete
Waiting for FutureTask2 to complete
Waiting for FutureTask2 to complete
Waiting for FutureTask2 to complete
Waiting for FutureTask2 to complete
FutureTask2 output=pool-1-thread-2
Done

As such there is no benefit of FutureTask but it comes handy when we want to override some of Future interface methods and don’t want to implement every method of Future interface.

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Pankaj

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JournalDev
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March 3, 2019

Would you please show the usage of overloaded submit(Runnable, T) method.

- Pran

    JournalDev
    DigitalOcean Employee
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    June 28, 2017

    Hello Thank you for a wonderful series of tutorials on Executor framework. May I ask two basic questions regarding this tutorial: 1. why on the 2nd example ‘while (true)’ is needed? what changes if we skip it? 2. what does futureTask1.get() / futureTask2.get() return ? isn’t it callable1.call() / callable2.call() ? if so, why why we output futureTask1.get() in negation if(!futureTask1.isDone())? what do we expect to ‘get’ when the task did not finish yet? Thank you

    - Andrey

      JournalDev
      DigitalOcean Employee
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      May 10, 2017

      hi , i am usimg above code by creating inner class, but task execute at once only not continuesly execute, i want execute continuesly with 1 sec delay…

      - Nikhil

        JournalDev
        DigitalOcean Employee
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        May 10, 2017

        Hi, i am using above code, my thread run only once i want execute continues with 1 sec delay…

        - Nikhil

          JournalDev
          DigitalOcean Employee
          DigitalOcean Employee badge
          April 21, 2017

          Nice article… good job. Just one thing about this web site -You have a very annoying popup ( FREE eBook… ) on your web page, which cannot be closed due to over-lapping share-bar. Please get rid of this…

          - Shashi

            JournalDev
            DigitalOcean Employee
            DigitalOcean Employee badge
            December 10, 2016

            Here in the above example we are implementing callable and passing it to execute(). execute() only accepts Runnable,so i think you should be using submit() here.

            - Shivam

              JournalDev
              DigitalOcean Employee
              DigitalOcean Employee badge
              September 26, 2016

              Bydefault, Future task is run asynchronously , so will be executed in a different Thread from the one which added it by calling the execute method. For example " Thread1" called execute method , Futuretask will be executed in “Thread2”. Thread1 can get the result by calling " get" method of Futuretask it passed. On the other hand , callable by default will be executed on same Thread , unless you are using custom executor that starts a new thread. If " Thread1" submitted callable, the callable will be run on Thread1, unless the executor you are using spawns a new thread and run the callable in that thread Look at AsyncTask in android, attribute " mWorker" is a callable , which then is passed into “mFuture” which is a Future task… It is the Futuretask which will be passed to ThreadPoolExecutor., so future task executes asynchronously in another thread - the mWorker that it has. One more thing mWorker does is it makes the thread in which it is running a background thread as well.

              - H

                JournalDev
                DigitalOcean Employee
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                June 15, 2016

                Good examples. keep posting and thanks for your dedication

                - mbappe

                  JournalDev
                  DigitalOcean Employee
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                  October 6, 2014

                  Nice job …keep posting…

                  - navin murrari

                    JournalDev
                    DigitalOcean Employee
                    DigitalOcean Employee badge
                    July 15, 2014

                    Hi Pankaj, Thanks for article. Well, for all of them… keep up good work. Anyway, one thing bothers me. Why not to use submit(Callable) instead? Is this solution has some benefits i can not see now? Cheers.

                    - Josiash

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