Dynamic Clock in java

Question

I want to implement a clock within my program to diusplay the date and time while the program is running. I have looked into the getCurrentTime() method and

Answer 1

This sounds like you might have a conceptual problem. When you create a new java.util.Date object, it will be initialised to the current time. If you want to implement a clock, you could create a GUI component which constantly creates a new Date object and updates the display with the latest value.

One question you might have is how to repeatedly do something on a schedule? You could have an infinite loop that creates a new Date object then calls Thread.sleep(1000) so that it gets the latest time every second. A more elegant way to do this is to use a TimerTask. Typically, you do something like:

private class MyTimedTask extends TimerTask {

   @Override
   public void run() {
      Date currentDate = new Date();
      // Do something with currentDate such as write to a label
   }
}

Then, to invoke it, you would do something like:

Timer myTimer = new Timer();
myTimer.schedule(new MyTimedTask (), 0, 1000);  // Start immediately, repeat every 1000ms