My understanding is that if I start up another thread to perform some actions, I would need to SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait or SwingUtilities.invokeLater to update the GUI while I'm in said thread. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

What I'm trying to accomplish is relatively straightforward: when the user clicks submit, I want to (before performing any actions) disable the submit button, perform the action, and at the end of the action re-enable the button. My method to perform the action updates the GUI directly (displays results) when it gets the results back.

This action basically queries a server and gets some results back.

What I have so far is:

boolean isRunning = false;

synchronized handleButtonClick() {
  if ( isRunning == false ) {
    button.setEnabled( false );
    isRunning = true;
    doAction();
  }
}

doAction() {
  new Thread() {
    try {
      doAction(); // Concern A
    } catch ( ... ) {
      displayStackTrace( ... ); // Concern B
    } finally {
      SwingUtilities.invokeLater ( /* simple Runnable to enable button */ );
      isRunning = false;
    }
  }
}

For both of my concerns above, do I would have to use SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait since they both will update the GUI? All GUI updates revolve around updating JTextPane. Do I need to in my thread check if I'm on EDT and if so I can call my code (regardless of whether it updates the GUI or not) and NOT use SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait?