Dec 25, 2011
Night #5: thread() in Processing
I just updated the Thread tutorial on the Processing wiki to include a little known function in Processing called thread(). It’s undocumented as of now, but will be a part of the 2.0 documentation. Here’s how it works.
(This following is excerpted from the tutorial).
You are likely familiar with the idea of writing a program that follows a specific sequence of steps — setup() first then draw() over and over and over again! A Thread is also a series of steps with a beginning, a middle, and an end. A Processing sketch is a single thread, often referred to as the “Animation” thread. Other threads sequences, however, can run independently of the main “Processing” sketch. In fact, you can launch any number of threads at one time and they will all run concurrently.
Processing does this all the time, whenever you write an event callback, such as serialEvent(), or captureEvent(), etc. these functions are triggered by a different thread running behind the scenes, and they alert Processing whenever they have something to report. This is useful whenever you need to perform a task that takes too long and would slow down the main animation’s frame rate, such as grabbing data from the network (XML, database, etc.) If a separate thread gets stuck or has an error, the entire program won’t grind to a halt, since the error only stops that individual thread. To create independent, asynchronous threads, you can use the thread() function built into Processing.
void setup() {
size(200,200);
// This will tell someFunction() to execute now as a separate thread
thread("someFunction");
}
void draw() {
}
void someFunction() {
// This function will run as a thread when called via
// thread("someFunction") as it was in setup!
}The thread() function receives a String as an argument. The String should match the name of the function you want to run as a thread. While using the thread() function is a very simple way of getting an independent thread, it is somewhat limited. Being able to make a thread object is a great deal more powerful, and this can be done by extending java’s Thread class.
For more about how to do that, take a look at the full tutorial.
Following is an example draws a loading bar in the “animation” thread that reports progress on another thread(). This is a nice demonstration, however, it would not be necessary in a sketch where you wanted to load data in the background and hide this from the user, allowing the draw() loop to simply continue.
