Update JavaFX 2 GUI at intervals? - javafx-2

Question

I've spent like the last 24 hours trying to learn JavaFX. I'm trying to build a GUI that will display values from a data source (for example a database). My question is what the preferred way is to do this. So far I've come up with this code to build a simple GUI and get some data from a data source:
import javafx.application.Application;
import javafx.application.Platform;
import javafx.scene.Group;
import javafx.scene.Scene;
import javafx.scene.text.Text;
import javafx.stage.Stage;
public class AvcHmi extends Application {
public static void main(String[] args) {
launch(args);
}
#Override
public void start(Stage primaryStage) {
Text t = new Text(10, 50, "Replace/update this text periodically with data");
Group root = new Group();
root.getChildren().add(t);
primaryStage.setScene(new Scene(root, 400, 300));
primaryStage.show();
new Thread() {
private DataSource dataSource = new DataSource();
{ setDaemon(true); }
#Override
public void run() {
try {
for(;;) {
Thread.sleep(100);
Platform.runLater(new Runnable() {
#Override
public void run() {
System.out.println(dataSource.getDataMap().get("key1"));
}});
}
} catch(InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}.start();
}
}
Datasource:
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.Map;
import java.util.Random;
public class DataSource {
Map<String,String> dataMap = new HashMap<>();
public DataSource() {
dataMap.put("key1", "value1");
dataMap.put("key2", "value2");
dataMap.put("key3", "value3");
}
public Map<String, String> getDataMap() {
Random generator = new Random();
int randInt = generator.nextInt();
dataMap.put("key1", "value"+randInt);
return dataMap;
}
}
100 ms is OK interval to update this GUI as far as I'm concerned. But is this a viable solution?
The next step is to replace the text with a value from the data source. Been looking at Collections and ObservableMap and wondering if it's a preferred way of doing the actual GUI updates? I'm aving some problems with inner classes and final variables but might reason that out after some sleep.
Also, the target machine is not that powerful (somewhere between 350-512 mb RAM). Could this be an issue? My simple tests so far seems to run fine.
Thank you for any feedback on this.

Answer 1

This Oracle example shows how to achieve concurrency loading in data table, with source code; it might help you
You could also look at reading about javafx.concurrent.Task<V> API.
The code on the Oracle example is as follows:
public class UpdateCustomerTask extends Task<Customer> {
private final Customer customer;
public UpdateCustomerTask(Customer customer) {
this.customer = customer;
}
#Override protected Customer call() throws Exception {
// pseudo-code:
// query the database
// read the values
// Now update the customer
Platform.runLater(new Runnable() {
#Override public void run() {
customer.setF setFirstName(rs.getString("FirstName"));
// etc
}
});
return customer;
}
}