JavaFX Task interface

I've been doing a bit of work on a JavaFX application turning it from a very rough prototype to a very rough product (i mean, what can one really accomplish in two weeks?). I already had a bunch of background tasks running using threads but because the original was thrown together in a rush for a small side-project I just hand-rolled everything using familiar techniques (combination of threads and ExecutorService).

I'd seen JavaFX's Task and wasn't really sure what the point was - sure it simplified a couple of things but Platform.runLater() is easy enough to use and so on.

But I found things got messy pretty fast and behaviour started leaking between abstraction layers.

So as part of this re-work I decided to "use it in anger" and see how it turned out. Quite well, if you're prepared to let JavaFX control the middle-tier of the application by using Task everywhere (and for a JavaFX application, there's no reason not to). Encapsulating the work in a Task object allows the decisions about what to do with the user interface to be decided wherever it is used; e.g. does it bother to start a spinny thing or just run silently and so on. And it handles some of the fiddly stuff so that you don't end up with a busy spinner that never runs out.

Having tasks as immutable single-use objects is how I usually write multi-thread code anyway so it wasn't much of a change (IMHO it's the only way which works). Basically all transient state needs to be captured in the job object so it can be worked on independently of the rest of the application, and all outputs are collected in a result object (memory permitting, and the size of modern memory systems makes them very permissive). If incremental updates are desirable then they can be communicated via some other mechanism although it is perhaps surprising how often incremental update just doesn't work very well for a user.

There are still some small gotchas. Say for example that you're firing off a calculation based on interaction with a slider. Ideally you want the result to update as fast as the slider does but this is often not possible. You can't just let every job run to completion because otherwise it will quickly start to lag and just feel wrong. You can't cancel every job if a new one arrives because you may never have one complete leaving the user staring at stale results. One hack is to just update the result when the user releases the slider knob but that removes most of the interactivity from the GUI and defeats the purpose.

Previously i've solved it by implementing a greedy consumer. Jobs are indivisible units which always run to completion (and to the user interface) but whenever the worker thread polls for incoming jobs it throws away all but the last one if more are queued. ExecutorService doesn't directly allow this granularity of job control but it can be emulated easily enough by something like the following.

ExecutorService queue;
Task task;

void dowork() {
   if (task != null && !task.isDone() && !task.isRunning()) {
       task.cancel();
   }

   task = new WorkTask( ... );

   task.setOnSucceeded( ... );

   queue.submit(task);
}

(is there another way? I don't know, this is what I found ...).

This isn't used for tasks which might take a very long time to complete but for ones which are already interactive speed or close to it (roughly, under 0.5s). It lets any already running jobs finish but cancels any waiting in the queue.

This makes the application "feel" much lighter and more responsive even if it does slightly more calculation than necessary. Unless the work is very trivial almost all such work needs to be thrown into a thread otherwise sliders start to feel unresponsive. This is pretty much the same for any toolkit (or os).