When to use SwingUtilies.invokeAndWait/invokeLater

Question

I read somewhere that for any thread that affects the visuals of the gui it should be ran in the EDT using SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait/invokeLater

For a basic gui, is i

Answer 1

Yes, if you touch a Swing object you have to do it on the EDT. In most cases you are already there, but if not, use the SwingUtilities classes. The reason for this is that the Swing classes are not multi-threaded, so you are likely to cause nasty problems if you access it on other threads. And it could be that setVisible() is doing a lot of things under the covers to make something display (like re-laying things out). Better to be safe.