方法运行时，JFrame被完全锁定

Question

I have a GUI(JFrame), with two Buttons and 1 Panel to show the result. One Button is to start the algorithm, one for stopping it. By pressing start, a method is called and it starts running. The runtime of this method varies from couple of seconds to 2-3 minutes, depending on the input.

The problem I have hereby is, by pressing the start-button, the GUI gets completely locked. I cannot press any button till the algorithm terminates. It would be great to be able to stop the algorithm and to visualize parts of the solution after a certain amound of time.

I checked every single line of the Frame, there is nothing that disables it.

//If needed I can provide code, but its pretty long and just some hints and reasons for the problem would be great and I try to fix it by myself.

thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Don't put long-running tasks on the EDT, or the Event Dispatching Thread. Use threading or a SwingWorker instead. Hopefully that's enough google keywords to get you started. :)

Answer 2

It sounds like your algorithm is running in the same thread as the UI components. You probably want to read up on Concurrency and Concurrency in Swing to better understand how to create threads, monitor execution, integrating these concepts with a Swing-based user interface, and so forth. At a very high level, you are going to need to somehow spawn a new thread when your algorithm starts and observe it for intermediate state changes to update the UI. You only want user interface related code running in the event dispatch thread .