Concurrency Zen
Threads are the most primitive of concurrency datatypes on the JVM. They're easy to use initially, but beyond basic use cases they become unwieldy, difficult to manage, and are nearly impossible to monitor correctly. The "CFThread in a for() loop and pray that none of the threads error" is a common, and terrible, practice.
Fortunately, a top-notch concurrency framework ships, today, with ColdFusion, and you can take advantage of these higher-level concurrency abstractions using JavaLoader in ColdFusion 9, and using native Java integration in ColdFusion 10.
In this session, I'll show the difficulties of writing correct code with just cfthread, dig into the pitfalls and dangers, and show why these higher-level abstractions are superior. I'll demonstrate how to use the Java Concurrency Framework to write sane, easy-to-manage, and most importantly -- safe -- programs which take advantage of concurrent processing.
The session will focus on writing simpler, smaller, *thread-UNAWARE* components, and delegating the messy concurrency details to the platform, resulting in code that is easier to implement, test, and maintain.
