Question

I want a thread to execute in the background every 500 milliseconds. To do that, I extended a Thread, implemented ActionListener and put the class that I extended into a Timer. The Timer calls run() every 500 milliseconds. However, my whole Swing GUI freezes up when this thread is downloading stuff from the Internet. I want it to run in the background, without freezing up the GUI while it waits for IO to finish. I also the downloader to finish downloading before we wait 500 milliseconds.

gogogo() is called to initialize the whole process:

public final class Downloader extends Thread implements ActionListener { public static void gogogo() {     t= new Downloader();     new Timer(500, (ActionListener) t).start();  }  public void run()  {     doStuff(); //the code that i want repeatedly called }  public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e)  {     run(); } } 

Answer 1

Just start the thread once, make it loop, and do Thread.sleep(500L) with each iteration. That probably makes more sense that starting a brand new thread every 500ms. No reason to incur the associated cost if you can avoid it.