netty5/src/main/java/org/jboss/netty/util/Timer.java

/*
 * JBoss, Home of Professional Open Source
 *
 * Copyright 2009, Red Hat Middleware LLC, and individual contributors
 * by the @author tags. See the COPYRIGHT.txt in the distribution for a
 * full listing of individual contributors.
 *
 * This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
 * under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as
 * published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of
 * the License, or (at your option) any later version.
 *
 * This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
 * Lesser General Public License for more details.
 *
 * You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
 * License along with this software; if not, write to the Free
 * Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA
 * 02110-1301 USA, or see the FSF site: http://www.fsf.org.
 */
package org.jboss.netty.util;

import java.util.Set;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;

/**
 * Schedules {@link TimerTask}s for one-time future execution in a background
 * thread.
 *
 * @author The Netty Project (netty-dev@lists.jboss.org)
 * @author Trustin Lee (tlee@redhat.com)
 * @version $Rev$, $Date$
 *
 * @apiviz.landmark
 * @apiviz.has org.jboss.netty.util.TimerTask oneway - - executes
 * @apiviz.has org.jboss.netty.util.Timeout oneway - - creates
 */
public interface Timer {

    /**
     * Schedules the specified {@link TimerTask} for one-time execution after
     * the specified delay.
     *
     * @return a handle which is associated with the specified task
     *
     * @throws IllegalStateException if this timer has been
     *                               {@linkplain #stop() stopped} already
     */
    Timeout newTimeout(TimerTask task, long delay, TimeUnit unit);

    /**
     * Releases all resources acquired by this {@link Timer} and cancels all
     * tasks which were scheduled but not executed yet.
     *
     * @return the handles associated with the tasks which were canceled by
     *         this method
     */
    Set<Timeout> stop();
}