The Runnable interface is preferred, as it does not require your object to inherit a thread because when you need multiple inheritance, only interfaces can help you. In the above example we had to extend the Base class so implementing Runnable interface is an obvious choice.

Also note how the threads are started in each of the different cases as shown inthe code sample. In an OO approach you should only extend a class when you want to make it different from it’s superclass, and change it’s behavior.

By implementing a Runnable interface instead of extending the Thread class, you are telling to the user that the class Counter is an object of type Base and will run as a thread.