Thread is not Thread? is not muti tasking?

Question

hi all, plz help for my thread problem
i have written a swing class with inplememnt a mouselistener
and in my swing class there is a JButton
and i have overload the
mousepressed and mouserelease ..etc method
such that:
public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent e) {
System.out.println("mouse Released");
public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e) {
System.out.println("mouse pressed");
when i press the Jbutton.
it print out
mouse pressed
mouse released
mouse clicked
the problem appear when i add a thread to mousepressed function
such that:
public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e) {
System.out.println("mouse pressed");
mythread = new myOwnThread();
mythread.start();
System.out.println("thread Created");
public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent e) {
System.out.println("mouse Released");
if(mythread.isAlive())
mythread.destroy();
mythread is class that with a forever looping. i wanna to kill mythread
when the user release the mouse button.
however, after the mythread is added. the mouselistener can't get the mouseReleased event. and i can't kill mythread by detect release event.
can anyone help me?? urgent.
yours,
Terry Chan.

Answer 1

What you really want to know is how to stop your "MyThread" class. This is one of the most commonly asked questions in this forum so I will try to explain my view thoroughly.
You cannot automagically stop a Thread. The Thread class has a stop method but it is deprecated -- don't use it. The only official way to stop a thread, therefore, is for the "run()" method to exit.
As a result, you need to add functionality to your thread class to make the run method exit. A good way to do this is to add a boolean member variable to your Thread class. Then, sometime in each loop of your run method, check to see if you should stop and break out of the loop.
Here is one possible example, there are any number of other ways to accomplish the same thing:
public class MyThread extends Thread {
  private boolean endThread = false;
  private final Object END_MUTEX = new Object();
  public void setEndThread(boolean endThread) {
    synchronized(END_MUTEX) {
      this.endThread = endThread;
  public boolean getEndThread() {
    synchronized(END_MUTEX) {
      return this.endThread;
  public void run() {
    while(true) {
      if (getEndThread())
        break;
      else {
         // do stuff
      Thread.yield();
}