Thread-safe setting of a variable (Java)?

Question

Given the following code:

public class FooBar { 

  public static volatile ConcurrentHashMap myConfigData  = new ConcurrentHashMap();      

}

public class          


        

Answer 1

volatile guarantees atomicity, visibility and acts as a 'memory barrier' (google for it, if you want to know what that means) - at least since Java 5. Therefore it does exactly what you want.