Question

I am building a swing application. At some point, I have to start an “animation”:

...
jpanel1.setBackground(Color.Black);

Delay(milli)   

jpanel1.setBackground(Color.White);
...

and so on.

The gui itself and all the logic behind it work.It is just this time depended color-changing that does not. I have read, that swing is not thread safe, but all the examples I found showed me how to start another thread (for example in the background) but never how to stop the current swing-gui thread.

Edit:

The application should work as following:

1. configuration files are read, jframe is set up.
2. some simple questions are beeing asked
3. a dialogue is opened, which explains the animation.
4. after the user clicked “ok” the animation – some color flashing – is started. the color and the delay between the color-changing is depended on the configuration
5. another dialogue is opened and the programm continues -> new jpanel inside the jframe, buttons and so on.

the online thing that does not work are the delays between the color-changing. I understand now why it does not work and I am trying to build a timer, which activates a actionlister, which then changes the color and stops the timer… it just seems so much work for a simple delay… and I have to reorganize the entire animation in the application.

Answer 1

Take a look at: https://timingframework.dev.java.net/

and the samples that come in http://filthyrichclients.org/

They provide some very good information on how animation work and using the Timer framework. You’ll have a good understanding of how it works.

I did a sample animation here with Swing after reading those:

count down demo app http://img580.imageshack.us/img580/742/capturadepantalla201004wd.png
_{Java application featuring blog.stackoverflow.com page ( click on image to see the demo video )}

But I’m not even sure what is what you want to achieve.

EDIT

I read about the timing framework to understand better what is all about, but I actually didn’t use it ( it is useful to create animations with no linear times – ie no every second as mine, but things like 1, 5, 3, 2 seconds )

The code I’m using in the demo above is exactly this:

final Timer imageTimer = new Timer();
imageTimer.schedule( new TimerTask() {
    public void run() {
        changeImage();
    }
}, 0, 10000 ); //<-- every 10 seconds. 

The animation for the “stackoverflowing” and the count down use a similar approach.