System wide modal message box pop-up from applet

Question

Hi,
I am having an applet which is listening on a soket and has to pop-up a message box with the received data as and when it receives it.
I have used JOptionPane.showMessageDialog() for this.
Now, the requirement is the MsgBox should come up even if the user is working on another console/window. Btw, I am running the applet on windows-XP/2000 with JRE1.4.2. I have used null as the first parameter to the showMessageDialog function above, but its not popping up if I am workin in some other window.
Anybody having ideas on how to do it, please reply.
Thanks
Sujit

Answer 1

Pop up a Frame or JFrame showing the message. You can make it passably modal by having the applet nap while it's visible:
JFrame msg = new JFrame( "Got Data!" );
...// add message
msg.setVisible( true );
// may not pop up instantly:
while ( !msg.isVisible() ) pause( 10 );
while ( msg.isVisible() ) pause( 50 ); // wait for user to close
private static void pause( int millis ) {
   try { Thread.sleep( millis ); }
   catch ( InterruptedException e ) {}
}