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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

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Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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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.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat= Spring Boot)
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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.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat=Spring)
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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.

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Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag=Microservices)
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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.

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eBook – Guide Spring Cloud – NPI EA (cat=Spring Cloud)
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eBook – Mockito – NPI EA (tag = Mockito)
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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:

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eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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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:

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eBook – Reactive – NPI EA (cat=Reactive)
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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:

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eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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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:

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eBook – Jackson – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Do JSON right with Jackson

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eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=Http Client-Side)
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Get the most out of the Apache HTTP Client

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eBook – Maven – NPI EA (cat = Maven)
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eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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eBook – RwS – NPI EA (cat=Spring MVC)
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Building a REST API with Spring?

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Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Get started with Spring and Spring Boot, through the Learn Spring course:

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Course – RWSB – NPI EA (cat=REST)
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Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:

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Course – LSS – NPI EA (cat=Spring Security)
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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:

>> Learn Spring Security

Course – All Access – NPI EA (cat= Spring)
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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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Course – LSD – NPI EA (tag=Spring Data JPA)
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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:

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Partner – LambdaTest – NPI EA (cat=Testing)
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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:

>> Automated End-to-End Testing With Playwright

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (cat=Baeldung)
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eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI (cat=Java Concurrency)
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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:

>> Download the eBook

1. Overview

In this article, we’ll learn using the synchronized block in Java.

Simply put, in a multi-threaded environment, a race condition occurs when two or more threads attempt to update mutable shared data at the same time. Java offers a mechanism to avoid race conditions by synchronizing thread access to shared data.

A piece of logic marked with synchronized becomes a synchronized block, allowing only one thread to execute at any given time.

Further reading:

An Introduction to Synchronized Java Collections

Learn how to create synchronized collections using the static synchronization wrappers available in the Java Collections Framework.

Guide to java.util.concurrent.Locks

In this article, we explore various implementations of the Lock interface and the newly introduced in Java 9 StampedLock class.

Volatile vs. Atomic Variables in Java

Learn the difference between the volatile keyword and atomic classes and what problems they solve

2. Why Synchronization?

Let’s consider a typical race condition where we calculate the sum, and multiple threads execute the calculate() method:

public class SynchronizedMethods {

    private int sum = 0;

    public void calculate() {
        setSum(getSum() + 1);
    }

    // standard setters and getters
}

Then let’s write a simple test:

@Test
public void givenMultiThread_whenNonSyncMethod() {
    ExecutorService service = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(3);
    SynchronizedMethods summation = new SynchronizedMethods();

    IntStream.range(0, 1000)
      .forEach(count -> service.submit(summation::calculate));
    service.awaitTermination(1000, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);

    assertEquals(1000, summation.getSum());
}

We’re using an ExecutorService with a 3-threads pool to execute the calculate() 1000 times.

If we executed this serially, the expected output would be 1000, but our multi-threaded execution fails almost every time with an inconsistent actual output:

java.lang.AssertionError: expected:<1000> but was:<965>
at org.junit.Assert.fail(Assert.java:88)
at org.junit.Assert.failNotEquals(Assert.java:834)
...

Of course, we don’t find this result unexpected.

A simple way to avoid the race condition is to make the operation thread-safe using the synchronized keyword.

3. The Synchronized Keyword

We can use the synchronized keyword on different levels:

  • Instance methods
  • Static methods
  • Code blocks

When we use a synchronized block, Java internally uses a monitor, also known as a monitor lock or intrinsic lock, to provide synchronization. These monitors are bound to an object; therefore, all synchronized blocks of the same object can have only one thread executing them at the same time.

3.1. Synchronized Instance Methods

We can add the synchronized keyword in the method declaration to make the method synchronized:

public synchronized void synchronisedCalculate() {
    setSum(getSum() + 1);
}

Notice that once we synchronize the method, the test case passes with the actual output as 1000:

@Test
public void givenMultiThread_whenMethodSync() {
    ExecutorService service = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(3);
    SynchronizedMethods method = new SynchronizedMethods();

    IntStream.range(0, 1000)
      .forEach(count -> service.submit(method::synchronisedCalculate));
    service.awaitTermination(1000, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);

    assertEquals(1000, method.getSum());
}

Instance methods are synchronized over the instance of the class owning the method, which means only one thread per instance of the class can execute this method.

3.2. Synchronized Static Methods

Static methods are synchronized just like instance methods:

 public static synchronized void syncStaticCalculate() {
     staticSum = staticSum + 1;
 }

These methods are synchronized on the Class object associated with the class. Since only one Class object exists per JVM per class, only one thread can execute inside a static synchronized method per class, irrespective of the number of instances it has.

Let’s test it:

@Test
public void givenMultiThread_whenStaticSyncMethod() {
    ExecutorService service = Executors.newCachedThreadPool();

    IntStream.range(0, 1000)
      .forEach(count -> 
        service.submit(SynchronizedMethods::syncStaticCalculate));
    service.awaitTermination(100, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);

    assertEquals(1000, SynchronizedMethods.staticSum);
}

3.3. Synchronized Blocks Within Methods

Sometimes we don’t want to synchronize the entire method, only some instructions within it. We can achieve this by applying synchronized to a block:

public void performSynchronisedTask() {
    synchronized (this) {
        setCount(getCount()+1);
    }
}

Then we can test the change:

@Test
public void givenMultiThread_whenBlockSync() {
    ExecutorService service = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(3);
    SynchronizedBlocks synchronizedBlocks = new SynchronizedBlocks();

    IntStream.range(0, 1000)
      .forEach(count -> 
        service.submit(synchronizedBlocks::performSynchronisedTask));
    service.awaitTermination(100, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);

    assertEquals(1000, synchronizedBlocks.getCount());
}

Notice that we passed a parameter this to the synchronized block. This is the monitor object. The code inside the block gets synchronized on the monitor object. Simply put, only one thread per monitor object can execute inside that code block.

If the method was static, we would pass the class name in place of the object reference, and the class would be a monitor for synchronization of the block:

public static void performStaticSyncTask(){
    synchronized (SynchronisedBlocks.class) {
        setStaticCount(getStaticCount() + 1);
    }
}

Let’s test the block inside the static method:

@Test
public void givenMultiThread_whenStaticSyncBlock() {
    ExecutorService service = Executors.newCachedThreadPool();

    IntStream.range(0, 1000)
      .forEach(count -> 
        service.submit(SynchronizedBlocks::performStaticSyncTask));
    service.awaitTermination(100, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);

    assertEquals(1000, SynchronizedBlocks.getStaticCount());
}

3.4. Reentrancy

The lock behind the synchronized methods and blocks is a reentrant. This means the current thread can acquire the same synchronized lock over and over again while holding it:

Object lock = new Object();
synchronized (lock) {
    System.out.println("First time acquiring it");

    synchronized (lock) {
        System.out.println("Entering again");

         synchronized (lock) {
             System.out.println("And again");
         }
    }
}

As shown above, while in a synchronized block, we can repeatedly acquire the same monitor lock.

4. Conclusion

In this brief article, we explored different ways of using the synchronized keyword to achieve thread synchronization.

We also learned how a race condition can impact our application and how synchronization helps us avoid that. For more about thread safety using locks in Java, refer to our java.util.concurrent.Locks article.

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.
Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Spring Boot)
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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.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat = Spring)
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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.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag = Microservices)
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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.

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=HTTP Client-Side)
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The Apache HTTP Client is a very robust library, suitable for both simple and advanced use cases when testing HTTP endpoints. Check out our guide covering basic request and response handling, as well as security, cookies, timeouts, and more:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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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:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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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:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

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Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=REST)

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Get started with Spring Boot and with core Spring, through the Learn Spring course:

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Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (All)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

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eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI (cat=Java Concurrency)
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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:

>> Download the eBook

eBook Jackson – NPI EA – 3 (cat = Jackson)