Running JPanels in their own threads.

Question

I'm having a bit of trouble with Swing components.

In one JFrame, I have a GLCanvas and a JEditorPane separated by a JSplitPane. This configuration makes display response choppy in both panels.

However, when I place the GLCanvas and JEditorPane each in their own JFrame, display response is great.

I would assume this is because, in the second case, all operations on these components are performed in separate threads. If so, my questions are as follows:

Is it possible to run components in their own threads? Or is there a better way I should be doing this?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Answer 1

I think your assumption is incorrect. All Swing draw operations occur on the same thread.

Perhaps you could expand on your description of 'choppy' ? Maybe this is double buffering vs non-double buffering issue?

Answer 2

I suspect that the poor performance in the first case has more to do with Mixing heavy and light components. Like most graphics APIs, Swing uses a single, event dispatch thread to update the screen; I'm guessing that JOGL must adhere to the same restriction. At the same time, there are many ways to perform work in another thread and communicate with the graphics environment.

Answer 3

Looks like @trashgod is right. GLCanvas is a "heavyweight" component descendent from awt Canvas. To see if it is really a case I suggest replacing GLCanvas with GLJPanel, which is a Swing component descendant from JPanel.