Sleep or pause function

Question

I am just starting out learning how to program applets so I am not familiar with this. I am creating a maze program which can be found here:
http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~mjm87/MazeThirteen.html
My problem is that I want to the show step by step how the maze is traversed. I am trying to slow the process down using the foloowing function in between steps through the maze:
    public void pause( long numberMillis )
        Date now = new Date();
        long exitTime = now.getTime() + numberMillis;
        while( true )
          now = new Date();
          if( now.getTime() > exitTime )
              return;
    }But when I use this, the applet locks up. It never comes back to life. Is there a way top pause the applet for some amount of time WITHOUT using threads? I don't want to use threads because I don't completely understand the way they work and I am under a dealine to get this completed. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Threads are the way to go. You create one and have it sleep for a number of milliseconds. The other way is the time honored but poor practice if creating a huge for loop that chews up CPU time. for ( int i=0; i < 1000000;i++) {do something} but you'll never know how long it take on a client machine.