Multiple Swing event-dispatch threads

Question

I would like to create a new event-dispatch thread in Swing, and I'm having trouble finding any references online for how to do this. I have done this in .NET by creating a new thread and calling Application.run(...). Has anyone done this? Is it possible in Swing?

FYI the reason I am trying to do this is because I am writing an Eclipse plug-in, and I would like to pop up dialogs that are not modal to the IDE but that are modal (blocking) to my UI logic. I could accomplish this using non-modal dialogs and callbacks, but that requires the overhead of making my code multi-threaded. I'll revert to that if the former is not possible.

Answer 1

Yes, it's possible. I've have done such multiple EDT dispatch threads logic in Swing. However, net result was that it didn't work reliably.

(a) All JVMs don't work nicely with multiple EDT threads (synchronization problems in graphics rendering logic in native code and such, IBM JVM failed with multiple EDT threads, Sun JVM & Apple JVM did work)

(b) Swing rendering logic has few bugs causing that random rendering errors will occur (for example, https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug?bug_id=6727829).

Anyway, doing this requires basically establishing two AppContexts, which each have their own EDT thread.