what whould happen if i painted the gui not using the event dispatching thread? for example, textArea.setText ("asdfsad") is called in a user thread but not using SwingUtility.invokeLater (..).
Swing is not thread-safe (apart from some small exceptions like JTextArea.append), so the results are unpredictable and your application will probably contain several bugs.
thanks. follow up a design question:
if we need to put every gui update on the event dispatching thread, would this be a performance issue.
for example, if one component in the gui receives 10-20 updates every second and other components are updated through user's actions. in this case, should we seperate these 2 type of updates for better performance?