Question about methods in a class that implements Runnable

Question

I have a class that contains methods that are called by other classes. I wanted it to run in its own thread (to free up the SWT GUI thread because it appeared to be blocking the GUI thread). So, I had it implement Runnable, made a run method that just waits for the thread to be stopped:
while (StopTheThread == false)
try
Thread.sleep(10);
catch (InterruptedException e)
//System.out.println("here");
(the thread is started in the class constructor)
I assumed that the other methods in this class would be running in the thread and would thus not block when called, but it appears the SWT GUI thread is still blocked. Is my assumption wrong?

Answer 1

powerdroid wrote:
Oh, excellent. Thank you for this explanation. So, if the run method calls any other method in the class, those are run in the new thread, but any time a method is called from another class, it runs on the calling class' thread. Correct?Yes.
This will work fine, in that I can have the run method do all the necessary calling of the other methods, but how can I get return values back to the original (to know the results of the process run in the new thread)?Easy: use higher-level classes than thread. Specifically those found in java.util.concurrent:
public class MyCallable implements Callable<Foo> {
  public Foo call() {
    return SomeClass.doExpensiveCalculation();
ExecutorService executor = Executors.newFixedThreadPool();
Future<Foo> future = executor.submit(new MyCallable());
// do some other stuff
Foo result = future.get(); // get will wait until MyCallable is finished or return the value immediately when it is already done.