Autoscolling on mouseMove without Drag & Drop

Question

I would like to create a JPanel that automatically scrolls in the direction of the mouse cursor in the same manner as the automatic scrolling that can be done with Drag & Drop. The difference is that I don't want the user to have to press the mouse button - I want them to simply place the mouse in a region of the panel near the border.
Does anyone suggest how I can do this? I tried using a custom DragGestureRecognizer that would recognize a mouseMove into the border region as a dragStart, but the DragGestureListener that handles the dragging ever only gets dragEnd events (which I take to mean that some JDK code in the middle somewhere is noticing the mouse button is not down so cancels the drag). I've tried having a separate thread that wakes up whenever a mouse enters the region near the border (instead of doing the drag gesture thing) that contiuously scrolls the view until the mouse exits the region, and it sort of works, but the visual effect is a choppy scroll two steps forward, scroll one step back kind of look. I'm guessing I have a multithreading issue where two threads are trying to draw the screen at slightly different views.
Any other suggestions or sample code on how to do such a thing would be appreciated.

Answer 1

By searching through these forums I've been able to piece together a solution. I won't show my ugly unrefactored code with bad dependencies, but the description should suffice:
First, I created a JPanel subclass that defines for itself 8 regions near its edges (north, south, east, west, northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest). This class also contains a timer. The constructor takes in the vertical and horizontal JScrollBar of the JScrollPane that will eventually contain it (ugly, I know, but I haven't refactored it yet).
The class has a mouseMotionListener that detects wether scrolling should be done and if so in what direction. It does this by comparing the mouseEvent location to the varoius regions.
When the mouse enters a scroll region from a non-scroll region, the timer starts. If it enters a scroll region from a different scroll region, scroll direction is recalculated. If it enters a non-scroll region, the timer stops.
When the timer fires (it fires periodically until stopped), an actionEvent handler in the class increments or decrements the scrollbars as appropriate.
Sounds rather simple, but it took me countless tries at various things to get it to work.