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javamultithreadingswingswingworker

What is the rationale of SwingWorker?

For what I can read, it is used to dispatch a new thread in a swing app to perform some "background" work, but what's the benefit from using this rather than a "normal" thread?

Is not the same using a new Thread and when it finish invoke some GUI method using SwingUtilities.invokeLater?...

What am I missing here?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SwingWorker

http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/articles/threads/threads2.html

Solution

  • Yes, you can accomplish what a SwingWorker does with vanilla threads + invokeLater. SwingWorker provides a predictable, integrated way to accomplish tasks on a background thread and report result on the EDT. SwingWorker additionally adds support for intermediate results. Again, you can do all of this yourself but sometimes it's easy to use the integrated and predictable solution especially when it comes to concurrency.