Hello all,

I needed a way for my class to sleep for a specified amount of time,
then wake up and perform an operation, in a non-blocking fashion.  I
came up with the following:

//************************************************************
 private class SleeperThread extends Thread {
   long _id;
   long _sleepTo;
   Executive _parent;
   SleeperThread(long sleepTo, long id, Executive parent) {
     _id = id;
     _sleepTo = sleepTo;
     _parent = parent;
   }

   public synchronized void run() {
     long interval = _sleepTo - time();
     if (interval > 0) {
       try {
         wait(interval);
       }
       catch (InterruptedException ex) {
         System.out.println("Sleep interrupted");
         return;
       }
     }
     _parent.timeTrigger(_id, _sleepTo);
   }
 }
//************************************************************

This class is constructed with a long representing the time in epoch
millis to sleep until, a long timer ID, and a pointer to its parent.
The run method waits for the desired duration, then calls a method in
the parent called "timeTrigger".  It would be invoked like this:

//************************************************************
   SleeperThread sleeperThread = new SleeperThread(time, sleeperID,
this);
   sleeperThread.start();
//************************************************************

This seemed like an elegant solution, and it works sometimes, but other
times timeTrigger is never called, in an unpredictable fashion.  It is
hard to debug the multi-thread behavior in JBuilder.

Am I making an invalid assumption?  Have I made a coding blunder?  Is
there a built-in way to do this?  Note that I cannot just call wait()
in the main thread, because that would block the thread's execution.

Any help would be appreciated.

Joshua McGee