Display another modal dialog box on top of other modal dialog boxes in Java

Question

I have a rather strange question: I have a Java application which uses "applications" (plugins) run in different threads. Most of these plugins will be written by other people and I will have no control over the code. The application requires a permanent connection to the Internet as information is constantly transferred between the server and app. What I want to do is have a thread which runs in the backround checking to see if there is a Internet connection. If the connection drops I want the ENTIRE application (and all its threads) to pause, display a message and when reconnected resume. I want this dialog box to be displayed above all other dialog boxes (modal or not). I'm thinking of something like the Windows Vista User Account Control Alerts.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

To solve this at all reasonably, you need to use Java 6, as previous versions simply don't give you the granularity of modality you need.

Here are the modality options.

For this to work effectively, you would have to have each plugin honor a contract to not use Toolkit modality (the default behavior is that a modal dialog box locks everything up, to keep backwards compatibility). Application modality would seem to be a great fit for you, but I don't see that you can implement this in Java. This seems to be up to the JVM vendor, as far as I could find.