Java Event Timing / Scheduling Question

Question

Hi everyone,
Looking for some pointers in the right direction. I'm writing a program that controls a hardware device to operate outputs at specific times in a timeline defined by the user. The delays between events are not regular and may vary from 1/10th of a second to several seconds or even minutes apart. I was wondering what the best way to implement the timing / event handling component of my program might be?
I was thinking of storing the timings in an array, and then sequentially looping through that array and passing each time delay to one java.util.Timer object, and then firing the appropriate event for each, and then loading in the next time delay and so-on until all events have been fired.
Is there a better way?
Richard.

Answer 1

The delays will never be less than 1/10th of a
second, and very unlikely to be more than a couple of
minutes. Are there any problems passing very large
delays (say an hour as an extreme example) to
Thread.Sleep()?No, that's not a problem.
>
I could possibly load my timing data and other event
parameters into a result set. (Thinking of storing
each sequence as a series of database records).
To answer your question, the user specifies each
delay individually. Say event one must fire at 0
seconds, the next at 3.7, the next at 6.2 seconds,
and so-on.So that is 3.7 seconds after the start, or is it 3.7 seconds after the previous event was fired?