Question

The scenario is this: I have Java swing application with JFrame. There is textarea where you can type things, then you get the search results in another textarea and when you select one of the results, there is a button “Download”. And here comes the problem. When you hit “Download” the application should display information about the completness of the downloaded files. I’ve do this with a class extending Thread called DownloadManager which updates the information on a period of time. However I’m concerned that there may be problems with synchronization. Is there a standard way to update such dynamic info without threads? Is there a mainloop or something like this in Java swing classes. How do you do it?

Answer 1

Have a look at SwingWorker:

http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/javax/swing/SwingWorker.html

There may be better ways but that’s what I used for my progress bar when downloading things and updating progress bars.