Mokka mit Schlag » Java

Last night I was teaching my Intro Java class about Swing windows, and specifically discussing the event dispatch thread. I dutifully warned everyone that all creation and update of Swing components had to happen on this thread, usually by calling SwingUtilties.invokeLater(). Then one of my students asked a question that stumped me:

Is the same true for AWT components?
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I must be missing something obvious. Is there a method anywhere in the AWT (preferably in Java 1.4 but maybe 1.5) that allows me to determine the z-order, relative or absolute, of free-standing windows such as frames and dialogs? Specifically I need to know which of several dozen frames is on top among that group. To make this trickier:

1. There may be other frames and dialogs that do not count. For instance, if the preferences dialog is really on top, I still need to know which of my application’s document windows is on top among the document windows.
2. I need to know this even when the application is in the background, so that the top window may not be active.

Surely there’s a function for this somewhere? If not, it’s a pretty glaring hole. Do I really have to write code to watch each and every operation that can move a frame to the front, and track the front window manually?

To avoid needless duplication of source files in two different repositories, I would like to write an Ant build.xml file that copies files from one .jar file to another. I don’t want to copy everything in the source jar, just certain selected files.
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