interrupting threads

The documentation is confusing me on this.

What I want is having a thread sleep until I give it a GO signal. How would I do this? I have looked into sleep() and interrupt(), but I don't really understand it. What does the "interrupted" state mean? Is it related to the running state of the thread? If yes, how? If no, how do I get the running state?

I want to be able to stop the thread again with another signal. How would I do that? suspend, stop etc. are deprecated.

Thanks in advance

I now use a signaling model with Object.wait() and Object.notify(), but I don't undestand their documentation either, so it might not work. Especially the parts about monitor ownership.

On a related note, is there something like a critical section in Java? I have several threads, and most of them might want to access one global java.awt.Robot object, I have to synchronize the access.

Here's the signaling code I currently use:

Code:

---

class SomeClass implements Runnable
{
        private Object startSignal;
        private boolean running;
        private Thread solver;

        public SomeClass()
        {
                startSignal = new Object();
                solver = new Thread(this);
                setRunning(false);
                solver.start();
        }

        public void startstop()
        {
                if(isRunning()) {
                        setRunning(false);
                } else {
                        setRunning(true);
                        startSignal.notify();
                }
        }

        synchronized boolean isRunning()
        {
                return running;
        }

        synchronized void setRunning(boolean r)
        {
                running = r;
        }

        // this might cause huge synchronization problems...
        public void run()
        {
                while(true) {
                        startSignal.wait();
                        while(isRunning()) {
                                internalStep();
                        }
                }
        }
}

---

internalStep does calculations.

The problem is that there might (and will) be several objects of SomeClass, each having it's own thread trying to access the same java.awt.Robot

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutor...o/threads.html

Any use? Theres some stuff on synchronising blocks etc.

HD

From what i remember of multithreadding the sleep method is used to put the thread to sleep for a period of time specified by the arguement passed to the method.

Calling wait() causes the current thread to block until the objects notify() method is called by another thread.

Dave: seems interesting, thanks.

Dilenger: yeah, that's about the part of the docs I understood . Nothing else.

Dave: just found out it's exactly what I needed. Double thanks. :)