ConcurrentHashMap in Java?

Question

What is the use of ConcurrentHashMap in Java? What are its benefits? How does it work? Sample code would be useful too.

Answer 1

The point is to provide an implementation of HashMap that is threadsafe. Multiple threads can read from and write to it without the chance of receiving out-of-date or corrupted data. ConcurrentHashMap provides its own synchronization, so you do not have to synchronize accesses to it explicitly.

Another feature of ConcurrentHashMap is that it provides the putIfAbsent method, which will atomically add a mapping if the specified key does not exist. Consider the following code:

ConcurrentHashMap<String, Integer> myMap = new ConcurrentHashMap<String, Integer>();

// some stuff

if (!myMap.contains("key")) {
  myMap.put("key", 3);
}

This code is not threadsafe, because another thread could add a mapping for "key" between the call to contains and the call to put. The correct implementation would be:

myMap.putIfAbsent("key", 3);