Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:
Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.
Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.
Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.
To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.
You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.
Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.
Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.
To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.
And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.
Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
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Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.
Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.
Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:
Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.
Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:
Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:
Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.
But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.
To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:
Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:
Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.
I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.
You can explore the course here:
All Access is finally out, with all of my Spring courses. Learn JUnit is out as well, and Learn Maven is coming fast. And, of course, quite a bit more affordable. Finally.
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Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.
Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:
End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.
Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.
When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:
Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:
Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:
Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.
Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:
1. Overview
Daemon threads in Java are background threads that support other tasks, like system garbage collection, logging, system monitoring, and more. They run with lower priority and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) terminates them after all user threads finish. Many JVM threads are daemon threads by default.
In this short article, we’ll explore the main uses of daemon threads, and compare them to user threads. Additionally, we’ll demonstrate how to programmatically create, run, and verify if a thread is a daemon thread.
2. Creating Daemon Threads
To create daemon threads, all we need to do is to call setDaemon() of the Thread API. In this example, we’ll use the NewThread class which extends the Thread class:
NewThread daemonThread = new NewThread();
daemonThread.setDaemon(true);
daemonThread.start();Any thread inherits the daemon status of the thread that created it. Since the main thread is a user thread, any thread created inside the main method is by default a user thread.
The method setDaemon() can only be called after the Thread object has been created and the thread hasn’t been started. An attempt to call setDaemon() while a thread is running throws an IllegalThreadStateException:
@Test(expected = IllegalThreadStateException.class)
public void whenSetDaemonWhileRunning_thenIllegalThreadStateException() {
NewThread daemonThread = new NewThread();
daemonThread.start();
daemonThread.setDaemon(true);
}Additionally, we can use the isDaemon() method to check if a thread is a daemon thread:
@Test
public void whenCallIsDaemon_thenCorrect() {
NewThread daemonThread = new NewThread();
daemonThread.setDaemon(true);
daemonThread.start();
assertTrue(daemonThread.isDaemon());
NewThread userThread = new NewThread();
userThread.start();
assertFalse(userThread.isDaemon());
}3. Differences Between Daemon and User Threads
So, we learned that Java offers two types of platform threads: user threads and daemon threads. While user threads are high-priority threads, daemon threads are low-priority threads whose only role is to provide services to user threads.
Let’s highlight other differences between daemon and user threads:
| Feature | Daemon Threads | User Threads |
|---|---|---|
| Priority | Lower priority, mainly for background services | Higher priority, for main application tasks |
| JVM Behavior | JVM exits when only daemon threads are running | JVM continues running as long as any user thread is alive |
| Typical Use Cases | Garbage collection, system monitoring, etc. | Application logic, main program flow |
| Lifecycle | Automatically terminates when all user threads finish | Needs to be manually terminated |
Since daemon threads are meant to serve user threads and are only needed while they are running, they won’t prevent the JVM from exiting once all user threads have finished their execution.
Infinite loops typically exist in daemon threads and won’t cause problems. This is happening because any code, including the finally blocks, won’t be executed once all user threads have finished their execution. As a result, daemon threads aren’t recommended for I/O tasks.
However, there are exceptions to this rule. Poorly designed code in daemon threads can prevent the JVM from exiting. For example, calling Thread.join() on a running daemon thread can block the application’s shutdown.
4. Conclusion
In this quick tutorial, we’ve seen what daemon threads are and what they can be used for in a few practical scenarios. Following that, we compared daemon threads to user threads, focusing on their differences.
The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.
