EventQueue Order (focusLost and actionPerformed)

Question

I have a JTextField and a JButton on the screen. I have set up a FocusListener for this JTextField and an ActionListener for the JButton.
If I enter text into the JTextField and then click the JButton with the mouse what order should I expect to see the events?
In most cases I get the focusLost event for the JTextfield and then the actionPerformed for the JButton.
However, I do sometimes get the actionPerformed first and then the focusLost. This seems to happen when running the Java client as a remote X11 client across a slow network connection. If the network is suffiiciently fast (whatever that is) then the events seem to come through as I'd expect.
When I get the actionPerformed event first then the button's hasfocus method returns FALSE. This makes sense since the textfield hasn't lost the focus yet.
Also if I run the client from my desktop machine without the remote X11 it works as I expect - focusLost on the textfield then actionPerformed on the button.
How can I be confident of the order of the events?
How can I tell and what do I do if the events come in out of order?

Answer 1

probably you solved it already, but for others:
public class DelayedButton extends JButton {
  private boolean actionPerformedDelayed = true;  // true = delay fireActionPerformed (default)
  public boolean isActionPerformedDelayed() {
    return actionPerformedDelayed;
  public void setActionPerformedDelayed(boolean delayActionPerformed) {
    this.actionPerformedDelayed = delayActionPerformed;
   * overwritten to make sure that actionPerformed is invoked
   * *after* focusLost has been processed by the opposite component!
  @Override
  protected void fireActionPerformed(final ActionEvent event) {
    if (isActionPerformedDelayed()) {
      EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
        public void run() {
          DelayedButton.super.fireActionPerformed(event);
    else  {
      super.fireActionPerformed(event);
}Replace all JButtons in your app by DelayedButton and you're done.
Regards,
Harald