I’d published a quick app called Memory Explorer I threw together using Rob Gonda’s ajaxCFC framework a while back. However, one thing that’s been bugging me ever since I made it was that I was using JSP pages to create certain Java objects and then putting them in a scope that ColdFusion could access – specifically the Request scope.

I always knew there had to be a way to create not only a Thread object, but also an array of Threads, however I didn’t make the time to investigate it. Then, by chance, I stumbled across some code I did last year regarding Bytes and Byte arrays and realized that I could use the same principles (after a few blind stabs in the dark) to create what I needed.

I also, then, re-found an article on Chrisian Cantrell’s site regarding creating Byte arrays in ColdFusion which I remembered that I referenced when I did my original code. Using my code and his examples as inspiration, I finally was able to access all of the threads currently running on my JVM and output them nicely to the screen. Here’s what you need to do.

First, create a Thread object which captures the current thread of your JVM
thisThread = createobject(“java”, “java.lang.Thread”);

Then, create a native Java Thread type by using the getClass() method
threadClass = createobject(“java”, “java.lang.Thread”).init().getClass();

Now, you need an Array to hold all of the threads because the ThreadGroup.enumerate() method requires a native Thread array as an argument.
threadList = createobject(“java”, “java.lang.reflect.Array”).newInstance(threadClass,thisThread.activeCount());

Next, you populate the Thread array with each item in the ThreadGroup.
thisThread.currentThread().getThreadGroup().enumerate(threadList);

Now you have your array of Threads which you can access in ColdFusion as a simple one-dimenstional array.
<cfdump var=“#threadList[1]#”>