Hi all--

I'm fairly new to swing programming, and am running into some problems
with my design.  I'm writing a program that runs multiple trials of an
experiment.  I have an initial JFrame which allows the users to set
some settings; a second JFrame is used to show run-time results of the
experiment, as well as receive user input during the experiment.   A
non-controller class is used to separate out the "business logic" from
the display logic, but I think this may be causing problems.

The control flow goes like this:
- initial JFrame starts up
- user hits "go!"
- control is passed to the controller

Regarding the controller class:
--- it initializes and displays the Results JFrame, setting up some
event listeners to handle the user input from the Results widget
( swing events on the jframe are converted into "generic" non-swing
events seen by the controller )
--- each trial of the experiment is very linear: input is received, a
calculation is performed, then an output is produced
--- the experimental input is received in real-time from two possible
sources, one is a widget on the results panel ( from the user ), the
other is a timer thread from the controller class ( cpu AI )
--- an input "lockbox" ( synchronized access to the input variable )
is used to allow both input threads to write to the same place, and
the experiment thread to read it as well
--- the controller class runs the experiment, placing the trials in a
for-loop.  At each iteration, it calls a "waitForInput()" method that
loops peeks at the lockbox until input is received, sleeping for x ms
at each iteration.  When the input is found, it processes the
experimental input, calculates the output, updates the display frame,
then iterates the trial count.
--- when trialNum trials have completed, the experiment thread
exits.

Right now, the second frame hangs upon display ( while the controller
is running ).  Note that if I ditch the initial frame and fire up the
controller directly, no problems.  Why is this?

Secondly, is this a really messed up design?
- I was trying to separate out business from display logic, and it
does seem to be cleaner than munging both controller/display
together.
- I decided for the controller to dominate the display, rather than
vice versa.  Perhaps this is thinking too procedurally, but I was
thinking that the display could totally change, and the controller
could stay largely the same.  Fundamentally, I thought this modelled
the natural dependency of the results display on the results logic.
- Is there a way for me to run the experiments procedurally in a big
for loop that waits for input, without causing headaches?  The
alternative I can think of is to have the controller be passive, and
react to events.  That means instead of a for loop, I need to use
promote some of those iterator variables into class members, and say,
each time a user input is fired off

Any good reading you might suggest as well related to this topic?

Thanks!

Isaac