How to Use Swing Timers

In general, we recommend using Swing timers rather than general-purpose timers for GUI-related tasks because Swing timers all share the same, pre-existing timer thread and the GUI-related task automatically executes on the event-dispatch thread. However, you might use a general-purpose timer if you don't plan on touching the GUI from the timer, or need to perform lengthy processing.

You can use Swing timers in two ways:

• To perform a task once, after a delay.
  For example, the tool tip manager uses Swing timers to determine when to show a tool tip and when to hide it.
• To perform a task repeatedly.
  For example, you might perform animation or update a component that displays progress toward a goal.

Swing timers are very easy to use. When you create the timer, you specify an action listener to be notified when the timer "goes off". The actionPerformed method in this listener should contain the code for whatever task you need to be performed. When you create the timer, you also specify the number of milliseconds between timer firings. If you want the timer to go off only once, you can invoke setRepeats(false) on the timer. To start the timer, call its start method. To suspend it, call stop.

Note that the Swing timer's task is performed in the event dispatch thread. This means that the task can safely manipulate components, but it also means that the task should execute quickly. If the task might take a while to execute, then consider using a SwingWorker instead of or in addition to the timer. See Concurrency in Swing for instructions about using the SwingWorker class and information on using Swing components in multi-threaded programs.

Let's look at an example of using a timer to periodically update a component. The TumbleItem applet uses a timer to update its display at regular intervals. (To see this applet running, go to How to Make Applets. This applet begins by creating and starting a timer:

timer = new Timer(speed, this);
timer.setInitialDelay(pause);
timer.start(); 

After starting the timer, TumbleItem begins loading a series of images in a background thread. Meanwhile, the timer events begin to occur, causing the actionPerformed method to execute:

public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
    //If still loading, can't animate.
    if (!worker.isDone()) {
        return;
    }

    loopslot++;

    if (loopslot >= nimgs) {
        loopslot = 0;
        off += offset;

        if (off < 0) {
            off = width - maxWidth;
        } else if (off + maxWidth > width) {
            off = 0;
        }
    }

    animator.repaint();

    if (loopslot == nimgs - 1) {
        timer.restart();
    }
}

Eventually, loopslot will reach the end of the image array and start over. When this happens, the code at the end of actionPerformed restarts the timer. Doing this causes a short delay before the animation sequence begins again.