wait until all threads finish their work in java

Question

I\'m writing an application that has 5 threads that get some information from web simultaneously and fill 5 different fields in a buffer class.
I need to validate buffer

Answer 1

Apart from Thread.join() suggested by others, java 5 introduced the executor framework. There you don't work with Thread objects. Instead, you submit your Callable or Runnable objects to an executor. There's a special executor that is meant to execute multiple tasks and return their results out of order. That's the ExecutorCompletionService:

ExecutorCompletionService executor;
for (..) {
    executor.submit(Executors.callable(yourRunnable));
}

Then you can repeatedly call take() until there are no more Future objects to return, which means all of them are completed.

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Another thing that may be relevant, depending on your scenario is CyclicBarrier.

A synchronization aid that allows a set of threads to all wait for each other to reach a common barrier point. CyclicBarriers are useful in programs involving a fixed sized party of threads that must occasionally wait for each other. The barrier is called cyclic because it can be re-used after the waiting threads are released.