Best Practice for killing a JavaME 1.2 thread?

Question

Question: I\'m interested to know the best practice for killing a long standing operation that is running as a background thread (lets call this thread Wo

Answer 1

Well, the best practice would normally be to get the connection to close, and then let the consequences of that ripple through to the thread, allowing it to exit cleanly.

How are you making the connection? Rather than waiting for it to time out, what are your chances of forcing it to close? Can you get hold of some connection object? Does the Blackberry have some other command that can be executed to kill a given connection?

Answer 2

How to kill a Thread is a difficult question. There is no guaranteed way to be able to stop or interrupt a Thread. However, if you take your current architecture and upon timeout, just close the stream (not the Connection), that should cause an I/O Exception to occur on the thread that is stuck in I/O. If it doesn't cause an IOException, then it should at least cause the read or write to return with EOF.

Note that closing the Connection doesn't help, as the JavaDoc says:

Any open streams will cause the connection to be held open until they themselves are closed.

You have to close the stream that was derived from the Connection.

Answer 3

I always believed that passing a flag into background thread in an atomic transaction has been the best way to ask a thread to stop. If it doesn't stop for a while, kill it.

Well, to add to that, if you believe 2 minutes is a long time, good for you. I'd let the user decide what's a long time with a cancel button.