The Life Cycle of a Thread

 

Now that you've seen how to give a thread something to do, we'll review some details that were glossed over in the previous section. In particular, we look at the life cycle of a thread: how to create and start a thread, some of the special things it can do while it's running, and how to stop it.

The following diagram shows the states that a Java thread can be in during its life. It also illustrates which method calls cause a transition to another state. This figure is not a complete finite state diagram, but rather an overview of the more interesting and common facets of a thread's life.