Java: Swing Libraries & Thread Safety

Question

I\'ve often heard criticism of the lack of thread safety in the Swing libraries. Yet, I am not sure as to what I would be doing in my own code with could cause issues:

Answer 1

Here's a pattern for makng swing thread-freindly.

Sublass Action (MyAction) and make it's doAction threaded. Make the constructor take a String NAME.

Give it an abstract actionImpl() method.

Let it look like.. (pseudocode warning!)

doAction(){
new Thread(){
   public void run(){
    //kick off thread to do actionImpl().
       actionImpl();
       MyAction.this.interrupt();
   }.start();  // use a worker pool if you care about garbage.
try {
sleep(300);
Go to a busy cursor
sleep(600);
Show a busy dialog(Name) // name comes in handy here
} catch( interrupted exception){
  show normal cursor
}

You can record the time taken for the task, and next time, your dialog can show a decent estimate.

If you want to be really nice, do the sleeping in another worker thread too.