Monitor Object

This article is extracted from POSA2 as a reading note.

The Monitor Object design pattern synchronizes concurrent method execution to ensure that only one method at a time runs within an object. It also allows an object's methods to cooperatively schedule their execution sequences.

There are four participants in the Monitor Object pattern:

Monitor object: A monitor object exports one or more methods. To protect the internal state of the monitor object from uncontrolled changes and race conditions, all clients must access the monitor object only through these methods. Each method executes in the thread of the client that invokes it, because a monitor object does  not have its own thread of control.

Synchronized methods: Synchronized methods implement the thread-safe functions exported by a monitor object. To prevent race conditions, only one synchronized method can execute within a monitor object at any one time. This rule applies regardless of the  number of threads that invoke the object's synchronized methods concurrently, or the number of synchronized methods in the object's  class.

Monitor lock: Each monitor object contains its own monitor lock. Synchronized methods use this lock to serialize method invocations on a per-object basis. Each synchronized method must acquire and release an object's monitor lock when entering or exiting the object. This protocol ensures the monitor lock is held whenever a synchronized method performs operations that access of modify the state of its object.

Monitor condition: Multiple synchronized methods running in separate threads can schedule their execution sequences cooperatively by waiting for and notifying each other via monitor conditions associated with their monitor object. Synchronized methods use their monitor lock in conjunction with their monitor condition(s) to determine the circumstances under which they should  suspend or resume their processing.