Time Sensitive Driven Operations

Question

Hi all,
I'm probably at a low intermediate level in Java.
I'm developing an application which will be open for a long period of time. However, about every 10 minutes, I want it to call a short maintenance method to take care of some other stuff.
However, polling is very inefficient, and hence I don't want to keep comparing System.currentTimeMillis() or a Date object in a while loop, as this would use needless resources that other programs could be using while my program has nothing to do until 10 minutes has passed but compare the time.
This brought me to consider threading and interrupts, something which I have never really delved into before. Any resource that could point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.
Perhaps it would be possible to make a new thread object at the end of my main, after all the GUI is built, and immediately make a loop and call sleep on it for 10 minutes and then do my maintenance, and then wait again? Not sure.

Answer 1

>
Perhaps it would be possible to make a new thread
object at the end of my main, after all the GUI is
built, and immediately make a loop and call sleep on
it for 10 minutes and then do my maintenance, and
then wait again? Not sure.Yes. An example:
==================
import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
public class PeriodicMaintenance {
     PeriodicMaintenance() {
          Maintainer m = new Maintainer();
          JButton b = new JButton("Test");
          b.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
                    public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ae) {
                         System.out.println("Click");
          JFrame f = new JFrame();
          f.add(b);
          f.setSize(400,300);
          f.setVisible(true);
          Timer t = new Timer(5000, m);
          t.start();
     public static void main(String[] args) {
          new PeriodicMaintenance();
class Maintainer implements ActionListener {
     public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent ae) {
          doMaintenance();
     private void doMaintenance() {
          System.out.println("Performing maintenance");
          try {
               Thread.sleep(2000);
          } catch(InterruptedException ie) {
               ie.printStackTrace();
}Note that this example performs the maintenance on the EventDispatchThread (EDT). You'll notice that the GUI is unresponsive for the 2 seconds that the Maintainer is running. If you have long running tasks to perform, use the SwingWorker class which will move the work to a non-EDT thread keeping the UI responsive while the task runs.