Guava tips: ThreadFactoryBuilder

Guava contains the simple and very useful class ThreadFactoryBuilder, which is most commonly used to set the thread names when using an Executor. This should always be done: thread names pop up in stack trace, when monitoring a running application with VisualVM, when printing deadlocks and so on. Doing this with ThreadFactoryBuilder is very simple:

Executors.newCachedThreadPool(
    new ThreadFactoryBuilder().setNameFormat("my-name-%d").build());

The threads in the pool will be named my-name-1, my-name-2 and so on.

You can also have all the threads created as daemons by using setDaemon. Finally, you can set an uncaught exception handler to handle in some way exceptions that the thread hasn’t caught, by using simply setUncaughtExceptionHandler.

Let me stress it once more: please always set a name for your threads. It will make your life easier, and - with the help of ThreadFactoryBuilder - it only takes one line of code.