Paintin in new thread

Question

Hi
I use a 3rd party product (a component in my GUI) that has a problem painting its components. The paint takes a long time. This freezes the whole application. I thought putting the paint call in the parent class that contains the offending component in a new Thread:
public void paint(Graphics g)
paintThread = new PaintThread(g);
SwingUtilities.invokeLater(paintThread);
public void rePaint(Graphics g)
super.paint(g);
private class PaintThread extends Thread
Graphics graphics = null;
public PaintThread(Graphics g)
graphics = g;
public void run()
rePaint(graphics);
This doesn't work, it leaves the component greyed out.
Any ideas?
Thanks
George

Answer 1

Chances are, unless you call it directly, that the paint(Graphics g) is being called in the Event Dispatch Thread. What you are doing is declaring a new Thread (PaintThread) that is never used as a Thread (never started). Instead, you use it merely as a Runnable whose run() method will be called later in the Event Dispatch Thread (that's what SwingUtilities.invokeLater is about).
Do you have access to the source code of your third party product? Feel free to post the paint method to see if it really is the bottleneck of your program.
Next time, please use code tags (see Formatting tips, prior to posting).