Updating - the best of both worlds

Question

Hi,
Ive had a look through a lot of the topics in this forum, though nobody seems to have wanted to do exactly the same as me.
My application has quite a few lengthy operations that are perfomed as part of an actionPerformed event. Im focusing on one particular event at the moment, but it will apply through my app (in about 8 places) so i need to get it right!!
If I dont put these methods in their own thread they will display their results after the operation, which is only a problem in that the app looks like its crashed (ie there is no update). So i placed them in their own thread, however this means that the user can keep starting these threads which causes massive headaches!!
What i actually want to do is suspend the event queue, until the operation is complete, but still update the windows, so the user can see that something is happening. In effect I want the effect of not putting the operation in a seperate thread (suspending the event queue), with the effect of doing this (a nice updated window).
Anybody know a way around this.
Steve

Answer 1

private boolean wait = false;
public void waitForSomeOperationToBeDone() {
   synchronized(getTreeLock()) {
       wait = true;
       while(wait) {
          try {
             getTreeLock().wait();
          } catch(Exception e) {
              break;
public void awake() {
   wait = false;
   synchronized(getTreeLock()) {
       getTreeLock().notifyAll();
}This usually does the trick for me, but it can fail sometimes. Try it...
It worked for me when I made a modal JWindow.
Nille