SwingUtilities.invokeLater

Question

My question is related to SwingUtilities.invokeLater. When should I use it? Do I have to use each time I need to update the GUI components? What does it exactly

Answer 1

Every Swing application has at least 2 threads:

1. The main thread that executes the application
2. The EDT (Event Dispatching Thread) is a thread that updates the UI (so the UI will not freeze).

If you want to update the UI you should execute code within the EDT. Methods like SwingUtilities.invokeLater, SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait, EventQueue.invokeLater, EventQueue.invokeAndWait allow you to execute code by the EDT.