Defining and Starting a Thread

An application that creates an instance of Thread must provide the code that will run in that thread. There are two ways to do this:

• Provide a Runnable object. The Runnable interface defines a single method, run, meant to contain the code executed in the thread. The Runnableobject is passed to the Thread constructor, as in the HelloRunnable example:

public class HelloRunnable implements Runnable {

    public void run() {

        System.out.println("Hello from a thread!");

    }

    public static void main(String args[]) {

        (new Thread(new HelloRunnable())).start();

    }

}

• Subclass Thread. The Thread class itself implements Runnable, though its run method does nothing. An application can subclass Thread, providing its own implementation of run, as in the HelloThread example:

public class HelloThread extends Thread {

    public void run() {

        System.out.println("Hello from a thread!");

    }

    public static void main(String args[]) {

        (new HelloThread()).start();

    }

}

Notice that both examples invoke Thread.start in order to start the new thread.

 Differences between Thread and Runnable interface.

1) Java doesn't support multiple inheritance, which means you can only extend one class in Java so once you extended Thread class you lost your chance and can not extend or inherit another class in Java.

2) In Object oriented programming extending a class generally means adding new functionality, modifying or improving behaviors. If we are not making any modification on Thread than use Runnable interface instead.

3) Runnable interface represent a Task which can be executed by either plain Thread or Executors or any other means. so logical separation of Task as Runnable than Thread is good design decision.

4) Separating task as Runnable means we can reuse the task and also has liberty to execute it from different means. since you can not restart a Thread once it completes. again Runnable vs Thread for task, Runnable is winner.

5) Java designer recognizes this and that's why Executors accept Runnable as Task and they have worker thread which executes those task.

6) Inheriting all Thread methods are additional overhead just for representing a Task which can can be done easily with Runnable.