The wait/notify mechanism in Java

One of the most commonly viewed articles on the Javamex site is our discussion of the wait/notify mechanism. It appears that this is a particular topic of doubt among developers.

The wait/notify mechanism is essentially used for one thread to "signal" or pass information to another thread. As of Java 5, the new concurrency classes provide more convenient alternatives to many common uses of wait() and notify(). See in particular:

• The CountDownLatch class used to co-ordinate threads;
• The BlockingQueue classes uesd to implement a producer-consumer pattern.

Suggested additions to these discussions are welcome (on this blog), as well as feedback on how well these articles helped you solve your problem.