The Real-Time Specification for Java provides a facility for Asynchronous Transfer of Control based on exception handling and a generalization of the interrupt() method from the Thread class. This mechanism allows the programming of useful idioms such as timeouts and thread termination without the latency found in polling, and it avoids the problems inherent in the Thread class’s stop() and destroy() methods.
Benjamin M. Brosgol, Scott Robbins, Ricardo J. Has