Applet/Swing user inactivity detection

Question

Hello,
I need some advise on the issue, of detecting user inactivity on my applet.
My current scenario is, my applet is hosted from a jsp page on the client machine, the applet contains a lot swing components (many jframes).
I want to somehow detect the user inactivity on that page hosting the applet.
Say for example if the user doesnt perform any action (like a mouse click) on the main applet or any of the child jframes spawned from it, for say 15 mins. I want to close the applet and the jframe saying Session Timeout.
Or other than this is there any way for applet to deal with session parameters to perform the timeouts, when no user activity takes place, on the JSP holding the applet.
Hope i am clear enough in my scenario.
Please advise.
Thanks,

Answer 1

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I need some advise on the issue, of detecting user inactivity on my applet. >Why are you deploying an applet, rather than a webstart based application? I ask this especially since...
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My current scenario is, my applet is hosted from a jsp page on the client machine, the applet contains a lot swing components (many jframes). >The entire app. sounds as though it is more based around free floating JFrames anyway.
I want to somehow detect the user inactivity on that page hosting the applet. Forget 'the page', since this can all be done within the applet or 'main GUI component' (should you decide to convert it to a JFrame).
The basic way outlined by the other tqwo responders would be the way to approach it. You app. needs to
a) Detect activity, and note the time.
b) Keep a timer running to check if the lastActivityTime has reached the limit, then..
c) Here we come to a bit of a tricky part... It is easy to detect 'activity' on a button or menu item that causes an event. You might put the code to handle the update of the timer into the event handler, but consider a JTextArea. An app. has a slew of buttons anf menu items, plus a number of JTextArea's for entering 'details'. Normally a JTextArea would not have an actionlistener, and would often not have any special handling on the KeyListener, so to avoid having to put a listener on every conceivable component that might hava 'activity', I suggest that at the end of the '15 minutes' you pop a modal JDialog itself with a 15 second 'you are about to be logged out' warning - and force the user to dismiss it in order not to be logged out.
d) When the user is logged out, you might indicate that by either removing all the components and replacing them with a message, or simply disabling all controls but the 'x' button (or something along those lines).
For the 'timer', there are a number of classes which might be used, from creating your own class that implements Runnable, through using a Swing based Timer to run the separate 'logout check' thread.