LEARNING OUTCOMES

The goals of this course are: 1) Acquire familiarity with cornerstone problems in concurrent and distributed programming; 2) Acquire familiarity with the tools provided by Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) to tackle those problems and their practical use.

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

The main objectives of the course are:

provide to the student the theoretical bases for understanding concurrency and synchronization;

provide to the student an applied knowledge of the Java language constructs that allow dealing with concurrency and shared resources in a multithreaded environment;

provide to the student a basic knowledge of network and distributed programming in Java.

PREREQUISITES

This course assumes the student has a working knowledge of Object Oriented Programming and is capable of reading and understanding example code.

TEACHING METHODS

Theoretical teaching with slides and real time step-by-step development of solutions for example problems

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

A brief review of the main Object Oriented Programming adopting the Java language.

Primitive types and Object types. Arrays and Strings. The concept of immutable object.

Classes, fields, methods, instance and class fields and methods. Constructors and static initializers. Inheritance and class hierarchies.

Polimorphism and type checking: static and dynamic binding.

Error checking and handling through exceptions. Propagation of error conditions.

Compile time type checking and run time type checking, the use of generics in Java classes.

Threads. Thread vs. process, memory model, switching model, execution model. Process memory segmentation in a multithreaded environment.

Shared resources and the concept of race condition.

Java instruments to sanitize the code dealing with a shared resource: synchronized blocks, locks.

The concept of condition and the need for atomicity when testing conditions and altering the system state.

Waiting for conditions: from busy waiting to wait/notify or await/signal.

Applying synchronization to complex data structures such as Java Collections.

Network programming in Java. Streams and Sockets. Datagram Sockets. Data serialization. Object Serialization.

Distributed Object Oriented programming: Java RMI.

Java RMI layered architecture: The stub/skeleton layer, The Remote Reference layer, The Transport Layer, The Application Layer.

Skeleton based servers and skeletonless servers: introduction to Java reflections.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Core Java: Fundamentals, Cay S. Horstmann

Core Java: Advanced Features, Cay S. Horstmann