Events,firing,listening-GUI/Networking seperation.

Question

I'm having a little trouble finding info on how to write my own events, event listeners and then how to fire these events. Basically i want to listen on a socket for info and then fire an event. I want to have a JList listen for this event and update itself.
I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it but I'd really be interested in any ideas or pointers to info on other ways this could be done.
Cheers.
-T

Answer 1

1. By default, reading from a socket blocks, so the simplest thing to do is start a thread to do the reading. (I haven't checked the i/o facility for polling in 1.4, but that would help if you were listening to several sockets).
2. Once you read some data, you need to update your ListModel. If you're using DefaultListModel, you're laughing because it manages its listener list and fires off events for you. But see point 4.
3. If you are subclassing AbstractListModel, you would need to call the appropriate fire*() method whenever your model changes state.
4. Watch out for Swing and threads. Listeners assume their being called in the EDT (Event Dispatch Thread). Typically, this means your socket reading thread uses SwingUtilities method invokeLater().
--Nax