Re: invokeLater and weird race conditions in my swing app
apm35 wrote:
I have discussed this with a colleague who suggest that I use the
function invokeLater to send any swing work to the swing event
dispatching thread. I will look into this but I am puzzled. My app
does not start such a thread explicitly so I wonder how it does get
Swing starts it when you start up the Swing components.
started. Also, why dont the swing functions do this work anyway?
What work? Your database work? That would be weird. In fact, that's quite
possibly what's happening - a Swing method is performing non-GUI work like
database calls, thus screwing your program up.
I am an ex-Motif programmer and from my Motif days I remember that all the
Motif and X11 calls do not render directly - they write a message to
the X11 server which will do the rendering upon rcpt of the message. I
assumed that swing would have a similar design but done using threads
within the app (my main thread making the swing call which would send
the request to the swing event message processing thread). So I
suppose it doesnt work like that then.
Swing isn't message based, it's method based.
Swing actually does work like that, so your supposition is exactly opposite
the reality. When you invoke a Swing method it is performed in the Event
Dispatch Thread (EDT).
Factoring the difference between methods and messages, that does seem similar
to the X Windows model. Of course, X is a separate rendering engine and Swing
is just method calls inside a program, so that engenders fundamental differences.
Anyhow, except for those differences, the X and Swing models are similar in
that both intend for only graphic events to happen inside, respectively, the X
server or the Swing EDT, asynchronously with the logic process or thread. For
either to perform non-graphical work would cause unpleasant results, and this
was perhaps the source of your trouble.
Since some of the work my app is doing is database-related this bit
can be slow so maybe this is why things get into a mess. Can any swing
gurus comment on this please?
I am not a Swing guru, but recognize that Swing is analogous to X, if an X
server were allowed to receive non-GUI requests at the programmer's
(in)discretion. In that world, the programmer would have to be sure not to
send such requests to the X server, just like in Swing one must avoid
performing non-GUI work in the EDT.
--
Lew