Using the JavaFX Concurrency Framework

It is common knowledge nowadays that almost all GUI platforms use a single-threaded event dispatching model. JavaFX is no exception, and indeed all user interface events in JavaFX are processed in the JavaFX Application Thread. However, with multicore desktop machines becoming common in recent years (e.g., I'm writing this chapter on my three-year-old quad-core PC), it is natural for the designers of JavaFX to take advantage of the full power of the hardware by leveraging the excellent concurrency support of the Java programming language.

In this section, we examine important threads that are present in all JavaFX applications. We explain the role they play in the overall scheme of JavaFX applications. We then turn our attention to the JavaFX Application Thread, explaining why executing long-running code in the JavaFX Application Thread makes your application appear to hang. Finally, we look at the javafx.concurrent framework and show you how to use it to execute long-running code in a worker thread off the JavaFX Application Thread and communicate the result back to the JavaFX Application Thread to update the GUI states.