The consensus, when it comes to multi-threading & concurrency in Java-land, is to isolate the code you want multi-threaded as a "task" and to submit that task to some kind of executor service or thread pool.
What I'm wondering is:
Thanks in advance for any clarity here!
Take a look at ExecutorService:
submit(Callable)submit(Runnable)Your task should probably be one of the two interfaces (which can always call other methods).
Your task is probably IO bound if you perform any input/output operations within it: IE, reading to a file, writing to a file, reading from a socket, writing to a socket, etc.
ExecutorService just calls the task's run() or call() method (whichever is applicable) and then whatever the definition of that method is determines what the task is bound by? Is that a fair generalization?
Threads usually execute the code they find in a class that implements Runnable.
Can a task be any method of any object, or does it have to be something special (if so, what)?
It can be anything. The big problem is that your task will probably include some objects which are shared with other threads. You must make sure that access to those objects is thread-safe. That is a complex topic; "Java Concurrency in Practice" by Goetz et al is a very good book.
