Complex concurrency in JavaFX: using ObservableLists and Properties from multiple worker threads

Question

I have multiple worker threads, and a JavaFX GUI which is reporting on what is happening in these threads.

There is a lot of data shared between threads and it needs

Answer 1

The original links with the full example and the example solution by jewelsea are dead, so I'll add an answer with a short summary of what I ended up doing.

To make this easy, let's assume you start with 1 class that holds your data model (let's call it DataModel). An instance of this class is used by multiple threads that change it.

Now the problem is that you want to use the data model in javaFX, but you cannot simply change your data model to use Property and ObservableList etc. If you do that, the listeners will be called from non-javafx threads, and GUI's bound to them will throw exceptions.

Instead you need to make a seperate data model class for javaFX. This is simply the JavaFX version of the original one (let's call it FXDataModel). So this version contains the same info, but it uses javaFX Property and ObservableList. This way, you can bind your GUI to it.

The next step is to periodically update a FXDataModel instance using the DataModel instance. To do this, you add an update(DataModel dataModel) method to FXDataModel, which copies the data from the original data model into the FXDataModel instance. This update function must always be called on the javaFX thread. Finally, all you need to do is periodically call that update function.

In my real scenario, I call the update function every 200 ms, and that is more than enough to be able to show a live view of the data model in the GUI. (Things get more complex if you want to more than a view of the data model, and you want to change things from the GUI, but that is not something I needed to do)