Swing Threads—A Caution!
The GUI components are maintained on the screen by a thread of their own, separate to any threads that you have running in your code. This GUI thread is called the event-dispatching thread, and it takes care of rendering the GUI components and processing any GUI events that take place. An example of a GUI event would be a mouse click, a selection from a menu, or a keystroke on a text field.
The need for thread safety occurs in the system libraries just as much as it does in your code. To work properly, Swing requires that all code that might affect GUI components be executed from the event-dispatching thread! The reason is performance: the GUI library does not have to do synchronization that would be required if ...
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