Many events generated by a graphical application are events are caused by a user such as mouse events or typing in a textbox, etc.

In contrast, a program can generate regular timer events by creating a Timer instance.

 ActionListener listener = ...

 final int DELAY = 100; // Milliseconds between timer ticks
 Timer t = new Timer(DELAY, listener);
 t.start();      

   

• The second parameter is the object with the event handler code to be executed each time the timer event occurs.

• Once the timer is started - t.start() - it will generate a timer event after DELAY milliseconds and reset the the timer.

  So timer events will continue to occur once every DELAY milliseconds.

• The timer can be stopped: t.stop()