Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

Name

Timer

Synopsis

This class implements a timer: its methods allow you to schedule one or more runnable TimerTask objects to be executed (once or repetitively) by a background thread at a specified time in the future. You can create a timer with the Timer( ) constructor. The no-argument version of this constructor creates a regular non-daemon background thread, which means that the Java VM will not terminate while the timer thread is running. Pass true to the constructor if you want the background thread to be a daemon thread. In Java 5.0 you can also specify the name of the background thread when creating a Timer.

Once you have created a Timer, you can schedule TimerTask objects to be run in the future with the various schedule( ) and scheduleAtFixedRate( ) methods. To schedule a task for a single execution, use one of the two-argument schedule( ) methods and specify the desired execution time either as a number of milliseconds in the future or as an absolute Date. If the number of milliseconds is 0, or if the Date object represents a time already passed, the task is scheduled for immediate execution.

To schedule a repeating task, use one of the three-argument versions of schedule( ) or scheduleAtFixedRate( ). These methods are passed an argument that specifies the time (either as a number of milliseconds or as a Date object) of the first execution of the task and another argument, period, that specifies the number of milliseconds between repeated executions of the task. The ...