How to create a delay in Swing

Question

I made a blackjack game, and I want the AI player to pause between taking cards. I tried simply using Thread.sleep(x), but that makes it freeze until the AI player is done t

Answer 1

Well, the following code shows a JFrame with a JTextArea and a JButton. When the buttons is clicked, the Timer send the event repeatedly (with a second delay between them) to the actionListener related to the button which appends a line with the current time.

import java.awt.event.ActionEvent;
import java.awt.event.ActionListener;
import java.util.Calendar;

import javax.swing.JButton;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JTextArea;
import javax.swing.Timer;


public class TimerTest extends JFrame implements ActionListener{

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 7416567620110237028L;
    JTextArea area;
    Timer timer;
    int count; // Counts the number of sendings done by the timer
    boolean running; // Indicates if the timer is started (true) or stopped (false)

    public TimerTest() {
        super("Test");
        setBounds(30,30,500,500);
        setDefaultCloseOperation(EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        setLayout(null);

        area = new JTextArea();
        area.setBounds(0, 0, 500, 400);
        add(area);

        JButton button = new JButton("Click Me!");
        button.addActionListener(this);
        button.setBounds(200, 400, 100, 40);
        add(button);

        // Initialization of the timer. 1 second delay and this class as ActionListener
        timer = new Timer(1000, this);
        timer.setRepeats(true); // Send events until someone stops it
        count = 0; // in the beginning, 0 events sended by timer
        running = false;
        System.out.println(timer.isRepeats());
        setVisible(true); // Shows the frame
    }

    public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
        if (! running) {
            timer.start();
            running = true;
        }
        // Writing the current time and increasing the cont times
        area.append(Calendar.getInstance().getTime().toString()+"\n");
        count++;
        if (count == 10) {
            timer.stop();
            count = 0;
            running = false;
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Executing the frame with its Timer
        new TimerTest();
    }
}

Well, this code is a sample of how to use javax.swig.Timer objects. In relation with the particular case of the question. The if statement to stop the timer must change, and, obviously, the actions of the actionPerformed. The following fragment is a skeleton of the solution actionPerformed:

public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
    if (e.getComponent() == myDealerComponent()) {
    // I do this if statement because the actionPerformed can treat more components
        if (! running) {
            timer.start();
            runnig = true;
        }
        // Hit a card if it must be hitted
        switch (getJBTable(JB.total, JB.aces > 0)) {
          case 0:
              JB.hit();
              break;
          case 1:
              break done;
          case 2:
              JB.hit();
              JB.bet *= 2;
              break done;
        }
        if (JB.total >= 21) { // In this case we don't need count the number of times, only check the JB.total 21 reached
            timer.stop()
            running = false;
        }

    }
}

IMHO this resolves the problem, now @user920769 must think where put the actionListener and the starting/stopping conditions...

@kleopatra: Thanks for show me the existence of this timer class, I don't know nothing about it and it's amazing, make possible a lot of tasked things into a swing application :)