Active rendering and the EDT (Swing animation)

Question

How should I run animation in a Swing applet?

I have an animation thread performing active rendering and it initially animates fine. Sometimes (anywhere from 1 minute to 2 hours later) it begins to fail to update the screen and only the sounds occur. I believe this is due to the fact that the paint is not performed from the EDT causing some kind of concurrency problem.

So, should the active rendering (ie getGraphics() and painting) be called only from the EDT? A problem with this is the Swing timer lacks precision.

Or has anyone had success with active rendering without using the EDT, and completely disabling any EDT updates to the page (maybe using Canvas / or ignore repaint on a JPanel)?

Answer 1

You can paint graphics into your own off-screen image in another thread and copy to the screen in the EDT. But for single threaded stuff, I would hope your frame rate is high enough to be able to do it in the EDT.

Answer 2

A few things to look at would be to make sure you are only repainting what needs to be repainted and not the whole graphics context each time unless necessary. Also there is a timing framework that you can use to handle some animations. I don't think it is actively being developed but last time I looked at it it had some nice api's to use for animation.

Without knowing your specific use case this is all I could come up w/ off the top of my head.