Is there a Mutex in Java?

See this page: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/javase/index-140767.html

It has a slightly different pattern which is (I think) what you are looking for:

try {
  mutex.acquire();
  try {
    // do something
  } finally {
    mutex.release();
  }
} catch(InterruptedException ie) {
  // ...
}

In this usage, you're only calling release() after a successful acquire()

Any object in Java can be used as a lock using a synchronized block. This will also automatically take care of releasing the lock when an exception occurs.

Object someObject = ...;

synchronized (someObject) {
  ...
}

You can read more about this here: Intrinsic Locks and Synchronization

No one has clearly mentioned this, but this kind of pattern is usually not suited for semaphores. The reason is that any thread can release a semaphore, but you usually only want the owner thread that originally locked to be able to unlock. For this use case, in Java, we usually use ReentrantLocks, which can be created like this:

import java.util.concurrent.locks.Lock;
import java.util.concurrent.locks.ReentrantLock;

private final Lock lock = new ReentrantLock(true);

And the usual design pattern of usage is:

  lock.lock();
  try {
      // do something
  } catch (Exception e) {
      // handle the exception
  } finally {
      lock.unlock();
  }

Here is an example in the java source code where you can see this pattern in action.

Reentrant locks have the added benefit of supporting fairness.

Use semaphores only if you need non-ownership-release semantics.