We have an applet that takes a long time (several minutes) to create its UI. We would like to be able to put up a busy cursor while the applet is loading. We
tried starting off the UI creation in a new thread, but when this thread is
done, the applet does not repaint itself, even when a repaint is invoked.
Resizing or scrolling the applet does cause the repaint to occur.

A test case follows. Uncommenting the join will cause the update to occur, but
then the busy cursor is not shown. Please let the alias falcon-eng@emp know if
there exist any workarounds. We have tried repaint(0), update, sync(), etc.

import java.applet.Applet;
import java.awt.Label;
import java.awt.Cursor;

public class AwtAsyncTest extends java.applet.Applet {

  public void init() {
    System.out.println("in init()");
    try {
      Thread.currentThread().sleep(5000);
    }
    catch (InterruptedException ex) {}
    System.out.println("exiting init()");
  }

  public void start() {
    System.out.println("in start()");
    Async async = new Async(this);
    async.start();
    /*
    try { async.join(); }
    catch (InterruptedException ex) {}
    */
    System.out.println("exiting start()");
  }

  public AwtAsyncTest() {
    System.out.println("in default constructor");
  }

  public AwtAsyncTest(java.applet.Applet app) {
    System.out.println("in constructor");
  }

  class Async extends Thread {
    Applet app;
    
    Async(Applet app) { this.app = app; }
    
    public void run() {
      app.setCursor(Cursor.getPredefinedCursor(Cursor.WAIT_CURSOR));
      try {
        Thread.currentThread().sleep(5000);
      }
      catch (InterruptedException ex) {}
      app.setCursor(Cursor.getDefaultCursor());

      // BUG: "done" not shown
      Label label = new Label("done");
      app.add(label);
      app.repaint();
    }
  }
}