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I have a several years of experience developing web applications with PHP and I've also worked with Java extensively (however never for web application development). I'm completing a large project that I've been working on for the past six months built in PHP/CodeIgniter and hosted with CloudControl (provides automatic server provisioning and scalability).

The project has gone well, and PHP served my needs - but now I'm in the beginning phase of developing a web application that will be targeted towards enterprise users and I'm considering using Java (possibly 'Grails') in conjunction with AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

My first question is: multi-threading, how often is it used in web application development for Java? With my PHP app, my server might have been required to make an API call to facebook in response to a user's request (say post to a user's wall). To avoid having my PHP process wait on the API call completing before returning to the user, I used Gearman job queing servers w/ workers to offload the work from my primary application server to a background worker.

Would a Java developer simply spin up a thread just to handle the API call and have the main process return to the user? Is this the biggest strength of Java development over PHP? Thanks!

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    I've been feeding myself with both languages for a while hehe. My very humble opinion is: the strength of Java is the availability of APIs and libraries. For PHP is speed to build up a prototype or a functional version. Look at me right now, I have chosen java yet again for a new project because I knew I could use Apache POI instead of PHPExcel... sort of laziness. :) Commented Dec 22, 2011 at 23:38
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    I know the ability to spawn new threads is a novelty to a PHP developer (such as myself) and having the power to use this nice feature that PHP so desperately lacks gives rise to a whole host of "ooh, I could do this, and this, and these things" type of thoughts - but be sparing. I heard too many stories of developers coming from PHP into some language that allows multi-threading, and getting into a situation where they have started 100 threads to do the job of something that could reasonably have been done in 3, and then wondering why the server is running like a dog. Commented Dec 22, 2011 at 23:41
  • I have used threads when users require data to be available (performance is a feature!) and gathering it all would require long wait times in a single thread. I'm sure there're many other cases where it proves helpful but it's not a silver bullet or a first thought when building something. Commented Dec 23, 2011 at 16:14
  • jakarta.ee/specifications/concurrency Commented Sep 9, 2024 at 0:06

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Would a Java developer simply spin up a thread just to handle the API call and have the main process return to the user?

It depends.

If you do that, then the original thread can do something else for a bit, but unless it is designed to be event based, then it will eventually need to wait for the secondary thread to finish ... and you are back where you started. (Actually you are worse off ... because you've now got 2 threads waiting.)

In the case of a web server implemented using classical Java servlets, each user request is run on its own thread. The simple approach would be to perform the API call on the request thread. This blocks the thread, but other threads can be working on other requests while this is going on. Assuming that you have enough threads in the web container's thread pool this works fine ... though you do end up using lots of resources (memory) on thread stacks.

The most recent versions of the Java servlet specs have added support for asynchronous processing. I'm not up to speed on the details, but this would in theory allow you to disconnect a request thread from a request while the latter was doing something that took a long time. However, I'm not convinced that this would help here ... unless you had a client side implementation of the API that was similarly able to run multiple simultaneous requests in parallel using a small (and bounded) number of Java threads.

There are possibly other alternatives, but they could be a lot more work.

My advice would be to go for a simple solution to start with. Just do the API call on the request thread, and configure your web server to use a reasonable number of request threads.

The chances are that you will be able to get away with "wasting" some memory to get the throughput you actually need. In the longer term you might need to address that, but you will have had time to learn more about the more scalable alternatives by then.

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Okay I now see that any threads spawned by a process must complete before the thread of execution that was started by a user request ends. With my PHP host, CloudControl, I'm only allowed two processes per box. To reduce my need to provision additional boxes I went with using a job queuing server and running several background workers that wait for jobs -- allowing the main thread to return when it doesn't have to wait for the result of an API call

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