What is the difference between Callback<T> and Java 8's Supplier<T>?

Posted by Dan Pantry on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Dan Pantry
Published on 2014-08-24T16:40:40Z Indexed on 2014/08/24 22:32 UTC
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I've been switching over to Java from C# after some recommendations from some over at CodeReview. So, when I was looking into LWJGL, one thing I remembered was that every call to Display must be executed on the same thread that the Display.create() method was invoked on. Remembering this, I whipped up a class that looks a bit like this.

public class LwjglDisplayWindow implements DisplayWindow {
    private final static int TargetFramesPerSecond = 60;
    private final Scheduler _scheduler;

    public LwjglDisplayWindow(Scheduler displayScheduler, DisplayMode displayMode) throws LWJGLException {
        _scheduler = displayScheduler;
        Display.setDisplayMode(displayMode);
        Display.create();
    }

    public void dispose() {
        Display.destroy();
    }

    @Override
    public int getTargetFramesPerSecond() { return TargetFramesPerSecond; }

    @Override
    public Future<Boolean> isClosed() {
        return _scheduler.schedule(() -> Display.isCloseRequested());
    }
}

While writing this class you'll notice that I created a method called isClosed() that returns a Future<Boolean>. This dispatches a function to my Scheduler interface (which is nothing more than a wrapper around an ScheduledExecutorService. While writing the schedule method on the Scheduler I noticed that I could either use a Supplier<T> argument or a Callable<T> argument to represent the function that is passed in. ScheduledExecutorService didn't contain an override for Supplier<T> but I noticed that the lambda expression () -> Display.isCloseRequested() is actually type compatible with both Callable<bool> and Supplier<bool>.

My question is, is there a difference between those two, semantically or otherwise - and if so, what is it, so I can adhere to it?

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