How do I give the program time to write to a JTextArea field

Question

Hi,
I created a swing application which listens for user input with a simple button that starts a whole process of reading database records, looping the records, writing files to a file system etc.
What I would like to do, is to present the user of the application with regular feedback on how far the program is in the overall execution of this big task.
something like:
- file a.pdf moved
- file b.gif moved
etc..
I write these line of text to a JTextArea control in my main panel.
I know the routines work, as feedback from the other controls are posted without problems in the JTextArea.
In a previous life (...those days) I did some work with .Net, and with something similar I learned that sometimes the application needs some time to "catch up" to be able to write to an UI component, by sleeping the thread for a second after each pass.
However, Thread.sleep(1000) does not seem to do the trick in my swing app.
Any ideas on how to do this?
Thanks,
-Rogier

Answer 1

JTextArea.append() is a thread-safe method, so you can call it and java thread scheduling will do everything for you
I'm not sure what you mean by "catch up", if your GUI stays responsive during your long job, than textArea will be updated.
public void runVeryLongJob(){
      for(int i=0;i<numOfTasksInLongJob;i++){
           doStuff(i);
           //update JTextArea     
       yourTextArea.append("Task "+i+" done");
}ok...camickr already answere this.. of course you have to be in separate thread for long job