Spring and Threads: Async

Previously, we started working with Spring and the TaskExecutor and became more familiar with using threads in a Spring application.

However, using the TaskExecutor might be cumbersome, especially when we need to execute a simple action.

Spring’s Asynchronous methods come to the rescue.

Instead of messing with runnables and the TaskExecutor, you trade the control of the executor for the simplicity of the async functions.

In order to execute your function in another thread, all you have to do is to annotate your functions with the @Async annotation.

Asynchronous methods come with two modes.

A fire and forget mode: a method which returns a void type.

@Async
@Transactional
public void printEmployees() {

    List<Employee> employees = entityManager.createQuery("SELECT e FROM Employee e").getResultList();
    employees.stream().forEach(e->System.out.println(e.getEmail()));
}

A results-retrieval mode: a method that returns a future type.

@Async
@Transactional
    public CompletableFuture<List<Employee>> fetchEmployess() {
        List<Employee> employees = entityManager.createQuery("SELECT e FROM Employee e").getResultList();
        return CompletableFuture.completedFuture(employees);
}

Pay extra attention to the fact that @Async annotations do not work if they are invoked by ‘this’. @Async behaves just like the @Transactional annotation. Therefore, your async functions need to be public. You can find more information in the AOP proxies documentation.

However, just using the @Async annotation is not enough. We need to enable Spring’s asynchronous method execution capability by using the @EnableAsync annotation in one of our configuration classes.

package com.gkatzioura.config;

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.core.task.TaskExecutor;
import org.springframework.scheduling.concurrent.ThreadPoolTaskExecutor;

import java.util.concurrent.Executor;

/**
 * Created by gkatzioura on 4/26/17.
 */
@Configuration
@EnableAsync
public class ThreadConfig {

    @Bean
    public TaskExecutor threadPoolTaskExecutor() {

        ThreadPoolTaskExecutor executor = new ThreadPoolTaskExecutor();
        executor.setCorePoolSize(4);
        executor.setMaxPoolSize(4);
        executor.setThreadNamePrefix("sgfgd");
        executor.initialize();

        return executor;
    }

}

The next question is how we declare the resources and the thread pools that the async functions will use. We can get the answer from the documentation.

By default, Spring will be searching for an associated thread pool definition: either a unique TaskExecutor bean in the context, or an Executor bean named “taskExecutor” otherwise. If neither of the two is resolvable, a SimpleAsyncTaskExecutor will be used to process async method invocations.

However, in some cases, we don’t want the same thread pool to run all of the application’s tasks. We might want separate threads pools with different configurations backing our functions.

To achieve that, we pass the name of the executor we might want to use for each function to the @Async annotation.

For example, an executor with the name ‘specificTaskExecutor’ is configured:

@Configuration
@EnableAsync
public class ThreadConfig {

    @Bean(name = "specificTaskExecutor")
    public TaskExecutor specificTaskExecutor() {

        ThreadPoolTaskExecutor executor = new ThreadPoolTaskExecutor();
        executor.initialize();
        return executor;
    }

}

Then our function should set the qualifier value to determine the target executor of a specific Executor or TaskExecutor.

@Async("specificTaskExecutor")
public void runFromAnotherThreadPool() {
    System.out.println("You function code here");
}

In the next article, we will talk about transactions on threads.

You can find the source code on GitHub.