Java 5 SwingWorker replacement

Our Swing application performs some long-running tasks in a background thread using the excellent SwingWorker class. However, a lot of older Macs only support Java 5, so we want to com开发者_Python百科pile our application as 5 instead of 6. Because SwingWorker was introduced in Java 6 we can no longer use it.

Would the following be an acceptable replacement if I only need to do something in the background and then communicate it in the GUI when done? Or am I forgetting something crucial?

public static void wannabeSwingWorker(final Runnable doInBackground, final Runnable callback) {
    Thread backgroundThread = new Thread(new Runnable() {
        public void run() {
            doInBackground.run();
            SwingUtilities.invokeLater(callback);
        }
    });
    backgroundThread.start();
}

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I'll let someone else comment on the suitability of your code, but as an alternative you can download a backport of Swingworker for use in Java 5 here.

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Your code should work correctly; of course you'll lose all the other features of SwingWorker (returning partial results and progress, being cancellable, supporting listeners),

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Take a look at Foxtrot, which works differently than most Swing concurrency libs.

Instead of firing a background thread to execute a long-running task, it emulates the approach taken by Swing when you show a modal dialog box by executing the long running task on the Swing EDT and firing up a new thread to handle GUI events.

When working with a long running task that returns a value that you immediately need to act on, this results in a very nice, procedural/non-concurrent looking piece of program code (exactly like checking the return value from JOptionPane.showConfirmDialog(...)).

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If you don't have any issues with LGPL code in your product, you can use the backport version of SwingWorker to Java 5.

http://java.net/projects/swingworker