Lock lck = ...

lck.lock();
try {
   ... access shared resource
} finally {
  lck.unlock();
}

As mentioned above, Lock is an interface. The implementation provided is ReentrantLock¹. As an example, we'll use a ReentrantLock to implement a simple concurrent integer array. (This is just an example of using locks: in reality, AtomicIntegerArray provides a better performing alternative.)

public class ConcurrentIntegerArray {
  private final Lock lock = new ReentrantLock();
  private final int[] arr;

  public ConcurrentIntegerArray(int size) {
    arr = new int[size];
  }
  public void set(int index, int value) {
    lock.lock();
    try {
      arr[index] = value;
    } finally {
      lock.unlock();
    }
  }
  public int get(int index) {
    lock.lock();
    try {
      return arr[index];
    } finally {
      lock.unlock();
    }
  }
}

In this example, we have an underlying array, arr, and we wrap accesses to this array in a lock/unlock pair. Once thing you may be wondering is about memory access semantics. With regular synchronized blocks, the JVM guarantees that entering and exiting the synchronized block acts as a "memory barrier", meaning that, for example, where a memory write occurs inside the synchronized block, this write cannot be re-ordered to occur after the block is exited (else another thread might not see it). Here, there's no synchronized, so how does it work? Well, it turns out that a contract of the Lock interface is that it provides the same memory barrier behaviour as synchronized. What that basically means is that we can safely use the lock/unlock action as the thing that guarnatees that a write by Thread A will be seen by Thread B.

In case it's not obvious: once we've chosen a Lock as our method of synchronizing access to a particular variable, we should make sure we use only that same lock object for all accesses. In particular, we can't mix synchronization via a Lock with synchronization via synchronized and expect it to work! I mention this mainly because it's an accident that could happen if you are adapting legacy code to use explicit locks instead of synchronized blocks². (When constructing the object, it is OK to rely on final here to make sure that the arr reference set by one thread is visible to other threads accessing the get/set methods.)

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