Accessing javax.swing.JPanel from outside the EDT

Question

Hi everybody!
I am not new to Java but to Swing.
Please consider the following:
public class MyPanel extends JPanel
     private int number = 0;
     private Object object = null;
     public int getNumber()
          return number;
     public void setNumber(int aNumber)
          number = aNumber;
     public Object getObject()
          return object;
     public void setObject(Object aObject)
          object = aObject;
Question:
Is it save to call the getters and setters defined above from a Thread other than the Event Dispatching Thread.
From my point of view and my understanding of Swing this should be save as the getters and setters do not touch anything other than the methods and instances defined within the object layer of MyPanel.
Please help :-)

Answer 1

jboeing wrote:
I might be wrong, but I think it's safe to touch the non-Swing methods in a subclass from other threads. The main concern in accessing Swing off the EDT is that you can concurrently modify parts of code, but since the EDT does not touch your getters and setters, at least it won't make deadlocks. Perfect, exactly what I would suggest. I couldn't have put it better.
The only oddities may occur if the member variable you set is used in logic for an overriden method (like paintComponent), but I don't think this will be too problematic in most cases.See what you mean so: What about synchronizing the getters and setters. Then only the scheduler would block the EDT as long as another Thread was touching the members. As no wait() and notify() calls arise this should not result in any deadlocks. The worst thing I could think of is that the responsiveness of the user interface may degrade if the EDT had to wait for a while as to many Threads were already waiting for synchronized accesss.
>
Edit:
Oh, and in the future, use the "*Code Formatting Tags*", see http://forum.java.sun.com/help.jspa?sec=formatting
Edited by: jboeing on Nov 13, 2007 1:14 PM
public class Apology{
    public static void main(String[] args){
        System.out.println("Thank you for your kind advice :-)");
        System.out.println("but please don't ask me why this is quoted style");
}Edited by: tog on Nov 14, 2007 6:08 PM