I have constructed a GUI with a JButton and a JTextArea.
When the JButton is pressed I want to execute a method that reads
information from somewhere and prints it to JTextArea.
The method that reads the information takes a few seconds to compute.

I followed the example at

   http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/misc/threads.html

And used the class

   http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/misc/example-1dot4/SwingWorker.java

From this I understood that any work that will take a long amount of
time should be executed in a seperate thread.

So here is what I have come up with

private class ButtonHandler implements ActionListener
{
  public void actionPerformed (ActionEvent e)
  {  
      String command = e.getActionCommand();

      if (command.equalsIgnoreCase("Get Data"))
      {
          final SwingWorker worker = new SwingWorker()
          {
             private Vector dataObjects;
                       
             public Object construct ()
             {
                //...code that might take a while to execute is
here...
                   

                //SomeObject has a method getAllData() that returns a
Vector of dataObjects
                //getAllData() takes in the order of a few seconds to
complete

                SomeObject so = new SomeObject();
                dataObjects = so.getAllData();

                return dataObjects;
             }

             public void finished ()
             {
                Enumeration enum = dataObjects.elements();
                                   
                while (enum.hasMoreElements())
                {
                   textArea.append(((DataObject)
enum.nextElement()).toString() + "\n");
                }
             };
             
             worker.start();
         }
     }
  }
}

My question is what is the proper way print the results from the
method getAllData() to the textArea.

The webpage says that any updating to the GUI components can be
carried out in the finished() method. So is this where I should print
out the results to the textArea?

If so, what is the best/correct way to pass the results from the
construct() method to the finished() method. I merely created a
variable ,private Vector dataObjects, which construct() writes into
and finished() reads from.

Any help/comments greatly appreciated.

regards,

pat