The Timer Class
The Timer
class provides a mechanism to generate timed events. It
has properties and events, and thus can be used in application builders
that understand JavaBeans. It fires an ActionEvent
at a given time. The timer can be
set to repeat, and an optional initial delay can be set before the
repeating event starts.
Properties
The Timer
class properties
give you access to the timer delays and nature of the event firing
loops. They are listed in Table
27-2. The delay
property dictates the length between repeated timer
events (if repeats
is true
) and initialDelay
determines how long to wait before starting the
regular, repeating events. Both properties expect values in
milliseconds. If your timer is not repeating, then the value of
initialDelay
determines when the
timer fires its event. You can check to see if the timer is running
with the running
property. The
coalesce
property dictates whether or not the timer combines
pending events into one single event (to help listeners keep up). For
example, if the timer fires a tick every 10 milliseconds, but the
application is busy and has not handled events for 100 milliseconds,
10 action events are queued up for delivery. If coalesce
is false
, all 10 of these are delivered in
rapid succession. If coalesce
is
true
(the default), only one event
is fired. The logTimers
property can be turned on to generate simple debugging
information to the standard output stream each time an event is
processed.
Table 27-2. Timer properties ...
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