How to lock a method for a whole class using synchronized?

Question

I know when you want to lock method to be executed by only one thread you declare it with synchronized keyword.

What about classes, how to provide a lock on an entire class of objects when a thread is executing some code on an instance of that class?

In other words, when a thread is executing a method on an object, no other thread should be allowed to execute the same method even on a different instance of the same class.

Answer 1

You synchronize on a specific object, either some designated static lock object, or the class object (which happens when static methods are declared to be synchronized):

class X {
    private static final Object lock = new Object();
    public void oneAtATime() {
        synchronized (lock) {
            // Do stuff
        }
    }
}
class Y {
    public void oneAtATime() {
        synchronized (Y.class) {
            // Do stuff
        }
    }
}

Each variant has its own pros and cons; locking on the class allows other code, outside of the class, to use the same lock for its own reasons (which allows it to orchestrate more high-level synchronization than what you provide) while the static final Object lock approach lets you prohibits it by making the lock field private (which makes it easier to reason about the locking and avoid your code from deadlocking because someone else wrote bad code).

You could of course also use some synchronization mechanism from java.util.concurrent, like explicit Locks, which provide more control over locking (and ReentrantLock currently performs a little better than implicit locks under high contention).

---

Edit: Note that static/global locks aren't a great way to go - it means every instance of the class ever created will essentially be tied to every other instance (which, aside from making it harder to test or read the code, can severely harm scalability). I assume you do this to synchronize some kind of global state? In that case, I'd consider wrapping that global/static state in a class instead, and implement synchronization per-instance rather than globally.

Instead of something like this:

class Z {
    private static int state;
    public void oneAtATime(){
        synchronized (Z.class) {
            state++;
        }
    }
}

Do it like this:

class State {
    private int value;
    public synchronized void mutate(){ value++; }
}
class Z {
    private final State state;
    public Z(State state){
        this.state = state;
    }
    public void oneAtATime(){
        state.mutate();
    }
}
// Usage:
State s1 = new State(), s2 = new State();
Z foo = new Z(s1);
Z bar = new Z(s1);
Z frob = new Z(s2);
Z quux = new Z(s2);

Now foo and bar are still tied to each other, but they can work independently from frob and quux.