Waiting for a thread to die.

Question

Hello, I hope you can help me...
I am writting a jdk1.4.1 Swing application that displays a small animation. This animation is processed from within a separate thread. My program makes a call starting this 'animation thread'. For practical reasons my program needs to wait for this thread to die (and thus the full animation to be shown) before it can continue. I am waiting for the animation thread to die using Threads 'join' method. However the problem with this is that I am forcing the GUI thread to wait resulting in the animation being calculated but not displayed. And so... how can I fix this... all I want is to wait until the animation is shown.
What I would like to do is:
1. Start animation;
2. wait intil animation has completed;
3. continue with program.
Any help or advice will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Maybe this design could work for you. You divide your program into three parts running in three separate threads.
1. The main thread handling GUI stuff and coordination of the two other threads.
2. A working thread doing most of what the main thread is now doing.
3. The animation thread.
With this division of labour the working thread is waiting for the animation thread to finish (the main GUI thread isn't). The main thread will be free at all times to react to the users input or updating the screen or whatever, while the other two threads are cooperating to produce the animation.