Swing timers and time consuming task

Question

I´m developing a Swing application. I need to run some tasks in background that, as a result, need to display messages on the TrayIcon. Those tasks must execute repeatedly, after some fixed delay, so i research and found Swing Timers as a good option. However, at the same time those tasks can be time consuming, and i don´t want that the GUI freezes or something like that (so, in order to fullfill this last requiriment i should go with Worker Threads instead). The thing is that worker threads don´t allow me to execute this tasks with some fixed delay and "forever".

I don´t know how to solve this, so any help would be appreciated :)

Answer 1

Have the actionPerformed of the Timer create a SwingWorker for the actual work.

Answer 2

You can create your task queue.

1. Create a Timer, that will shedule your task to some executor. (like ThreadPoolExecutor). At any delay, periodically, an so on.
2. Register a listener to task completion.
3. Executor will work with task on background.
4. When task is ready, notify main application via callback.

Do not work with simple threads. Java has a lot of concurent machanics, like Future and Executors.

Answer 3

you needn't create any extra multithreading support. timers create a new thread for running the commands in actionPerformed. alternatively you may also use 'java.util.Timer' as your timer. it is easier than swing and it also creates automatic threads each time you run.

   import java.util.*;

after this you may add

   Timer t=new Timer();
   t.scheduleAtFixedRate(new TimerTask(){
       void run(){
          // your codes to perform
       }, /*time in miliseconds*/);

this may solve your problem