Kill of the hang program...

Question

Hi ..
is there any way to kill off the hang program using java...
lets say i have this code below..
try{
a.print();
a.runPrint(); -------------> hang here and does not even throw exception
System.out.println("hi");
}catch(exception e)
System.out.println("Hi there");
What i want is if the method does not respond within some given time .. i will just kill it off and terminate the program.....
What should i do to add some coding?? is it using Thread or somehting??
Hopefully someone can give me example..
Thanks....

Answer 1

You cannot totally stop the blocking from occurring. You can gracefully try to end the thread. There must be some timeout for that process (though it could be hours or minutes). However, you could try something like:
class Connector implements Runnable {
   private Connection connection;
   public void run() {
       connection = connect();  // blocks
   public boolean isConnected() {
      return (connection != null);
   public Connection getConnection() {
      return connection;
class Caller {
   public Connection getConnection() throws IOException {
        Connector connector = new Connector();
        Thread thread = new Thread(connector);
        thread.start();
        Thread.sleep(1000);  // current thread, sleeps for 1 second
        if (connector.isConnected()) {
             return connector.getConnection();
        Thread.sleep(10000);  // wait 10 more seconds
        if (connector.isConnected()) {
             return connector.getConnection();
        throw new IOException("Unable to get connection");
}You could modify the above using the Observer-Observable pattern (or use a simple call-back function) to notify the caller when the connection is available rather than waiting specific amounts of time.
- Saish