Category: Java

How do you specify precisely which JDK will be used to run Eclipse?

The short answer: Put it in eclipse.ini:

-vm
C:\jdk1.7.0_76\bin\javaw.exe

The -vm and the path to the Java executable need to be on separate lines.

Reference this Eclipse wiki page about eclipse.ini for details.

True to the mission of this site, my first post reflects something for which I forgot the name and had to look up, so in the Javanator hopper it goes. Thread Confinement is a technique for making the use of an object thread-safe by guaranteeing that only one thread ever uses it. This is in contrast to many of the other techniques for engineering thread safety that involve a lot of guarding and synchronizing and general-purpose sweat of the mind.

The simplest way to ensure thread confinement is to write a single-threaded application. Unfortunately, this is harder to do than it sounds. Think you’ve written a single-threaded app? Don’t be so sure. Does your app use Swing? Definitely not single-threaded, then. Just because you haven’t spawned any threads doesn’t mean one of your frameworks hasn’t and frameworks, it seems, are everywhere these days, even for the smallest of tasks.

I first saw the term thread confinement in the book Java Concurrency in Practice. That reference contains a fine description of the technique, and includes subsections on implementing thread confinement using stack confinement, ThreadLocal variables, and ad-hoc techniques.