Controlling Task execution order with ExecutorService

Question

I have a process which delegates asynch tasks to a pool of threads. I need to ensure that certain tasks are executed in order. So for example

Tasks arrive in order<

Answer 1

When you submit a Runnable or Callable to an ExecutorService you receive a Future in return. Have the threads that depend on a1 be passed a1's Future and call Future.get(). This will block until the thread completes.

So:

ExecutorService exec = Executor.newFixedThreadPool(5);
Runnable a1 = ...
final Future f1 = exec.submit(a1);
Runnable a2 = new Runnable() {
  @Override
  public void run() {
    f1.get();
    ... // do stuff
  }
}
exec.submit(a2);

and so on.