Thread.sleep(xx) but the whole program sleeps?

Question

Hey.. i have a program that check-in some people.. if they have a dept, the prog will show a panel with a list..

so i wanna to set the panel not visible after a few seconds.. how could i do that?

I created a new Thread (FadeThread) and started it in the view, but now, when i write

Thread.sleep(5000)

the whole program sleeps for this 5seconds,.. i only want to wait in the background for 5seconds and set the panel visible(false) but the whole UI and the program sleeps..

Thanks..

Answer 1

Thread.sleep() will suspend the current thread, which I presume is the event dispatcher thread in your case. If you do it in a background thread, it should work, although if you accidentally call run() instead of start() , it won't.

To execute code with a set delay, you'll have to use the Timer class. Much cleaner and you don't have to worry about accidentally creating too many threads, not exiting a thread properly and so on.

Answer 2

You are causing the Event Dispatch Thread to sleep so the GUI can't react to events.

Read the section from the Swing tutorial on Concurrency for more information and a potential solution.

Answer 3

Assuming you're using Swing, have a look at the SwingWorker class. You can create a process that will block for 5 seconds and then hide the panel in a thread-safe manner.

Alternatively you could used a ScheduledExecutor as long as you make sure you run it on the EDT using invokeLater() .