Java's Swing Threading

Question

My understanding is that if I start up another thread to perform some actions, I would need to SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait or SwingUtilities.invokeLater<

Answer 1

In my opinion you should almost never use invokeAndWait(). If something is going to take awhile that will lock your UI.

Use a SwingWorker for this kind of thing. Take a look at Improve Application Performance With SwingWorker in Java SE 6.