<AWT Dev> Code review request: 7025699: Policy Tool is not accessible by keyboard

[alexander potochkin]

Hello

> Well, performing I/O or other blocking operations on EDT can only 
> freeze the app's GUI for the period of blocking. If developers/users 
> are OK with that, this is fine with me too.
>

I don't think an I/O blocking operation on EDT is acceptable. It can 
freeze the whole application and give a bad experience to the users.
Please consider using the SwingWorker API
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/concurrency/worker.html


> However, you should still call all Swing APIs (including creating your 
> components/windows) on the EDT. And I don't see this is being done in 
> your current code. As a minimum, the displayToolWindow() method should 
> be dispatched on the event thread. I haven't examined the code 
> closely, but if there are any other GUI updates from separate threads, 
> those should also be moved to the EDT. See the following tutorial for 
> details:
>
> http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/concurrency/dispatch.html
>

Indeed, rewriting an AWT app as a Swing app is not only about changing 
Labels to JLabels
Please make sure that all Swing code are used on the event dispatching 
thread only.

Thanks
alexp

> -- 
> best regards,
> Anthony
>
> On 10/15/2013 06:13 PM, Weijun Wang wrote:
>> Policy Tool is a GUI editor for the plain text policy file. The only I/O
>> is loading the policy file from disk and it should be quite small, so I
>> think there won't be a problem here.
>>
>> Thanks
>> Max
>>
>> On 10/15/13 8:08 PM, Anthony Petrov wrote:
>>> Hi Max,
>>>
>>> I don't have expertise in this code so I haven't reviewed the fix
>>> thoroughly. I'd like to point out one thing though: unlike AWT, 
>>> Swing is
>>> a single-threaded GUI toolkit. While in AWT you can create
>>> components/windows and call APIs on any thread, in Swing everything
>>> GUI-related must be performed on the Event Dispatch Thread (EDT) only.
>>> Any long, non-GUI-related operations (like I/O, computations, etc.)
>>> should be dispatched on other threads (with a SwingWorker, for 
>>> example).
>>>
>>> I don't see a single SwingUtilities.invokeLater/invokeAndWait() call in
>>> PolicyTool.java, so I thought I'd ask whether you're aware of the
>>> threading limitations imposed by Swing and how those are going to be
>>> addressed?
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> best regards,
>>> Anthony
>>>
>>> On 10/12/2013 04:49 AM, Weijun Wang wrote:
>>>> Hi All
>>>>
>>>> Please review the fix at
>>>>
>>>>     http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~weijun/7025699/webrev.00/
>>>>
>>>> The fix includes porting PolicyTool from AWT to Swing, defining
>>>> mnemonics for menu items and buttons, and adding keyboard shortcuts 
>>>> for
>>>> the File -> New/Open/Save items. Several tests are updated also.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks
>>>> Max