How to force pixels to hit the screen?

[Kevin Rushforth]

Hi Mike,

As long as you are doing any of the "heavy lifting" on the FX 
application thread it will necessarily starve the rendering, since the 
application thread is where animation is run and rendering is triggered. 
Applications are encouraged to do computationally expensive tasks or 
tasks that are subject to blocking (e.g., network reads) on a different 
thread.

You have a couple of choices:

1) Use a Preloader to display the splash screen. Do most of your 
initialization in the init method of the app, and then construct the 
scene graph and display it in the start method of the app. Further, as 
long as you don't create a Scene, you can construct much of your scene 
graph in the init method, too (there are also some controls that cannot 
be constructed off the App thread due to known issues).

2) Similar to above, but without a Preloader:  Create the splash screen 
in your start method. Do most of your initialization on a background 
thread (which you would also create in the start() method), allowing 
start() to return quickly; when the initialization is done, call 
Platform.runLater() to construct the scene graph.

Hope this helps.

-- Kevin


Mike Hearn wrote:
> I'd like to create my main stage, show some splash widgets, then begin the
> slower process of hauling the data and rest of the main UI into memory.
> Unfortunately when I do this most of the startup time has the stage being
> empty, instead of showing the splash. Introducing some artificial delays
> makes it reliably appear, but of course I don't want to slow down startup.
>
> My guess is that the app initialisation work is starving the render thread,
> so the pixels for the splash don't hit the screen quickly enough. I tried
> using an AnimationTimer to wait for a few pulses, but it didn't work. Ditto
> for plain old runLater.
>
> If anyone has ideas, it'd be appreciated.
>