Fastest way to create a Java message dialog (swing/awt/other)?

Question

I\'m creating a Java application that will do some processing then needs to display a message to give the user feedback.

However, it appears to be incredibly slow -

Answer 1

You could use the JOptionDialog

JOptionPane.showMessageDialog([parent frame], [message], [title], JOptionPane.MESSAGE_TYPE);

Answer 2

I would use a JOptionPane to show the message. Here's a simple example:

import javax.swing.*;

public class OptionDemo {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "Hello World");
    }
}

I'm afraid I can't explain the delay you're experiencing though. On my system, your code snippet runs in 500 milliseconds.

Answer 3

Java is the wrong tool for this. Setting up the JVM involves a lot of stuff happening in the background before the first line of Java code can be executed, and there's really no way to get around it.

Answer 4

Oh, and if you don’t really need to show the dialog from Java you could look into using KDialog (or it’s GNOME counterpart) or something similar.

Answer 5

The reason for the delay it because Java is an interpreted language and it takes time to start a new JVM ( the interpreter )

Actually creating the frame takes less than a few ms ( about 70 ms in my machine ).

If this is going to be used within a Java app, you don't need to worry about it. It will be almost instantaneous ( you should use JDialog or JOptionPane for this )

If this is NOT going to be used inside a Java app, and 2 secs it too much ( and I think it is too much ) you should consider another tool for the job.

Here's how I measure the time in your code:

import javax.swing.JFrame;

public class Dialog {

    public static void main( String[] args ) {
        long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
        JFrame frame = new JFrame( "DialogDemo" );
        System.out.println( "Took: " + (  System.currentTimeMillis() - start   ) );
    }

}

Answer 6

What you're probably looking for is the new SplashScreen functionality in Java 6. Instead of having to wait for the JVM to load (there's always a cost to load any VM), this will load a screen beforehand.