Dear lazy web,
It would be nice if you could tell me a non-hacky way to do progress dialogs from within the event-dispatch thread in Swing, where all of our application logic happens to reside.
This doesn’t work:
display modal dialog (won’t run because event thread is blocked)
start worker thread
Nor does this:
start worker thread (race condition hiding the dialog)
display modal dialog
Joining in the event thread won’t work because it blocks updates. Using a non-modal dialog and passing the bottom-half of the rest of the event thread to the worker thread to execute at completion will work, but is obscenely messy. Or, one can spin in the beginning of the thread waiting for the modal dialog to appear to avoid the race condition, but that is still gross. One could subclass Dialog and have it also signal a condition variable once it blocks… ugh.