<Swing Dev> <AWT Dev> Review request #4: 6852592 (invalidate() must be smarter) - approved

[Anthony Petrov]

While I'm still waiting for some answers to the questions outlined 
below, I also just recalled another issue.

About a year ago or so we developed a fix to replace the components 
array with a collection in the Container class. The initial version of 
the fix included synchronized (getTreeLock()) sections in such methods 
like countComponent(), getComponent(int), and some other. I recall we 
indeed faced dead-locks back then, and decided that a developer must 
hold the lock when calling these methods, so that we could avoid 
acquiring the lock ourselves.

How does that decision correspond to the current proposal of forcibly 
getting the lock in the preferredSize(), paramString(), some Swing 
methods, and others? Wouldn't that be safer to shift the responsibility 
of holding the lock to the user's code instead (as just assumed 
currently, in fact)?

--
best regards,
Anthony


On 10/08/2009 01:04 PM, Anthony Petrov wrote:
> On 10/8/2009 12:34 PM Artem Ananiev wrote:
>>>>>> Artem, would you agree on placing all calls to the isValid() under 
>>>>>> the TreeLock?
>>>>>
>>>>> Yes, that would be fine. Have we already introduced a warning about 
>>>>> all 
>>>>
>>>> OK, I'll modify the fix for 6887249 accordingly.
>>>
>>> Well, I revised the code, and it appears that the 'valid' boolean 
>>> field is declared volatile. Which basically means that we should only 
>>> acquire a lock when we need an atomic "read-then-update" sort of 
>>> operation (like validate() or invalidate() do.) When we need to read 
>>> the value of this field only w/o subsequent updating it, we don't 
>>> actually need any locking at all. So I tend to think that the fix for 
>>> 6887249 should modify the Container.validate() method only. What do 
>>> you think?
>>
>> If isValid() were a final method that just returns a value of 
>> 'isValid' field, then yes, we wouldn't have to provide any external 
>> synchronization. However, users might want to override isValid(), so 
>> I'd better place all the calls to isValid() under the tree lock.
> 
> What about the Component.paramString() method then? Couldn't it produce 
> some dead-locks while debugging is in progress?
> 
> Also, there's a number of isValid() calls in the Swing code (e.g., 
> JViewport, BasicTabbedPaneUI, and possibly some more.) Should these be 
> modified as well? Alex, what's your opinion?
> 
> -- 
> best regards,
> Anthony
>