Is there a clean way to retrieve the AWT event dispatch thread

Question

I'm trying to do some monitoring of the AWT Event Dispatch Thread's (EDT) health from a separate thread. If I start missing heartbeats I want to dump the EDT stack trace. The problem is the EventQueue doesn't expose a way to retrieve the current dispatch thread, the method that does is package private (probably for good reason). So I can either search through all the threads and look for a thread with a name like AWT-EventQueue-X or use an invokeLater or invokeAndWait and have my runnable save off the thread, something like:

EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable() {
    public void run() {
        eventDispatchThread = Thread.currentThread();
    }            
});

Then every time I go to dump the thread stack I have to first make sure the EDT I've got is still alive and if not go through the whole process again to get the thread. I'm just looking for a cleaner way to do this.

Answer 1

Alternatively, you can extend EventQueue, as shown here.