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Java Swing, 2nd Edition
book

Java Swing, 2nd Edition

by Marc Loy, Robert Eckstein, Dave Wood, James Elliott, Brian Cole
November 2002
Intermediate to advanced
1280 pages
38h 26m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Java Swing, 2nd Edition

Working with Swing

Our introduction to Swing wouldn’t be complete unless we briefly mentioned some caveats of the Swing libraries. There are two pertinent areas: multithreading and lightweight versus heavyweight components. Being aware of these issues will help you make informed decisions while working with Swing. Chapter 28 gives you in-depth guidance in these difficult areas.

Multithreading

Shortly before the initial release of Swing, Sun posted an article recommending that developers not use independent threads to change model states in components.[2] Instead, once a component has been painted to the screen (or is about to be painted), updates to its model state should occur only from the event-dispatching queue. The event-dispatching queue is a system thread used to communicate events to other components. It posts GUI events, including those that repaint components.

The issue here is an artifact of the MVC architecture and deals with performance and potential race conditions. As we mentioned, a Swing component draws itself based on the state values in its model. However, if the state values change while the component is in the process of repainting, the component may repaint incorrectly—this is unacceptable. To compound matters, placing a lock on the entire model, as well as on some of the critical component data, or even cloning the data in question, could seriously hamper performance for each refresh. The only feasible solution, therefore, is to place state changes in serial ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596004087Errata Page