About Daemon Threads in Java

Came across this cool article about Daemon Threads at http://www.absolutejava.com/main-articles/beware-the-daemons/

I knew that the VM does not exit as long as there is one non-daemon thread running. But there were a couple of new things I learned. Some snippets from the above article:

There are two ways a thread can become a daemon thread (or a user thread, for that matter) without putting your soul at risk. First, you can explicitly specify a thread to be a daemon thread by calling setDaemon(true) on a Thread object. Note that the setDaemon() method must be called before the thread's start() method is invoked.Once a thread has started executing (i.e., its start() method has been called) its daemon status cannot be changed.

The second technique for creating a daemon thread is based on an often overlooked feature of Java's threading behavior: If a thread creates a new thread and does not call setDaemon() to explicitlly set the new thread's "daemon status", the new thread inherits the "daemon-status" of the thread that created it. In other words, unless setDaemon(false) is called, all threads created by daemon threads will be daemon threads; similarly, unless setDaemon(true) is called, all threads created by user threads will be user threads.