You can take a look at a new article that describes SwingWorker...yes, I wrote it. Still, I think it's helpful, and I'm sure you'll let me know if it's not!

The article is here: Improve Application Performance with SwingWorker

I think some of the important points to remember include these:

• Get those long-running threads off the EDT
• Use SwingWorker to return both intermediate and final results to the EDT
• Show computation progress if appropriate. Users like to know what's going on!