How do you having a varying content in a JFrame's status bar?

[SrinivasanRG Gopal]

I have a swing application, in which I have a title bar. In this application, when I do any lengthier operation, lets say, fetch some records based on a complex criteria, I want my status bar to say "Processing Request" and should refresh to "Processing completed." when the page gets painted again.

Right now, though I have 2 messages, I seeing the final message alone, only after the operation gets completed. Till such time, I only see the background of the application itself.
I tried implementing a JTextField to have the status bar text, but the same result. Can you tell me how I can do it?
[ September 30, 2004: Message edited by: SrinivasanRG Gopal ]

[Ben Wood]

I suspect you will need to do the processing in a new thread, I think that way you should be able to update the GUI while the processing is going on