What is the purpose of TaskExecutor in spring?

Question

What is the purpose of TaskExecutor in spring. What problem does it solve ? How is it different from Executors in java concurrent package ?

Answer 1

From http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.0.8/reference/scheduling.html

23.4. The Spring TaskExecutor abstraction

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Spring's TaskExecutor interface is identical to the java.util.concurrent.Executor interface. In fact, its primary reason for existence is to abstract away the need for Java 5 when using thread pools. The interface has a single method execute(Runnable task) that accepts a task for execution based on the semantics and configuration of the thread pool.

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Answer 2

It's an interface whose implementations wrap around Java 5+ ExecutorService and provide implementations for previous versions of Java that are missing the package java.util.concurrent