How to queue up a bunch of user driven java swing events

Question

I have a bunch of checkboxes and radio buttons that allow a user to filter out items in a JTable .Each of the events need to be threaded to avoid the GUI freezing up.

What I would like to do is queue up the events and act on them in the order they were received.

Currently I have the following design but I think there must be a better way. Basically, I have for each potential queued method, an integer that maps to it. That integer value is added to a list in each actionPerformed method execution of integers that are looped through and translated to function calls.

I was possibly thinking about using a EventQueue to call run on it. What is the best pattern or technique for this type of functionality?

Vector<Integer> taskQueue;
/**
 * Adds tasks to a queue things are completed in the order they were added. This       allows for
 * threading and concurrency issues.One task is done at a time.
 * @param  
 */ 
private void doTasks()
{
     if(!queueIsRunning)
     {
         doTasks = new Thread(){
            public void run()
            {
               queueIsRunning = true;
                while(!taskQueue.isEmpty())
                {
                    intVal = taskQueue.get(0);

                    taskQueue.remove(0);
                    switch(intVal)
                    {
                      case DOM_HIGHLIGH_TASK:
                          System.out.println("starting dom highlight");
                          highlightDom();
                          break;
                      case FLASH_HIGHLIGH_TASK:
                          System.out.println("starting flash highlight");
                          higlightFlash();
                          break;
                      case SQL_HIGHLIGH_TASK: 
                          System.out.println("starting sql highlight");
                          highlightSQL();
                          break;
                      case INFO_HIGHLIGH_TASK:   
                          System.out.println("starting infoleak highlight");
                          highlightInfoLeak();
                          break;
                      case HTMLCOM_HIGHLIGH_TASK:
                          System.out.println("starting htmlcomm highlight");
                          highlightHtmlComments();
                          break;
                      case SORT_EXTENSIONS:
                          sortExtensions();
                    }
                }
               queueIsRunning = false;

            }
        };
        doTasks.start();
     }

}

Answer 1

The Event Dispatch Thread (EDT) has its own queue

SwingUtilities.invokeLater(new Runnable(){
    @Override
    public void run(){
        //do stuff
    }
});

Why is that not sufficient? If these are long-running tasks (which is hard to imagine), I'd check outSwingWorker .

Answer 2

If you're going for that pattern, use the event dispatch as mentioned by the other answer, but also ArrayBlockingQueue , which is present from Java 1.5 onwards. Then you can just use the take() method which will block until the command queue has elements.