<h3>Futures for Concurrency</h3>

<p>
This milestone includes a new, provisional API for futures.  Futures allow easier handling of 
concurrency and synchronization in multi-threaded and/or distributed systems, 
by introducing an object (the future result aka IFuture) that serves as a proxy for a result that 
is not known, because the computation of the result is not (yet) complete.
</p>
<p>
For example, here is an API that would normally return an Integer 
as the result of some synchronous computation
</p>
<p>
<blockquote>
<pre>
// foo() may be a long-running operation, and if so will block in order to 
// synchronously return the result
Integer result = foo();
</pre>
</blockquote>
With futures, foo() could instead return an IFuture, and thereby guarantee  
that foo() would not block indefinitely.
<blockquote>
<pre>
// foo will return the future immediately and operation will complete
// asynchronously
IFuture future = foo();
// do other things while operation is completed asynchronously
...
Integer result = (Integer) future.get();
</pre>
</blockquote>
</p>
See <a href="https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=253777">bug 253777</a>
to comment on or contribute to the ongoing work in this area.  Note that work is ongoing
to integrate this API with the <a href="https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=261952">Jobs API</a>, as well as 
integration with the futures support in JRE 1.5.