[Non-game] Some questions about making a program

General Discussions
#1

I have been tasked to make a check in/out program for my job. While I have worked with games before, I have never really done just a simple program, and I’m sure I have made a couple of mistakes.

First of all, I believe what I’m using is called passive rendering. The program doesn’t use any keyboard, or mouse input. So I decided to make it look nice with a full screen window, that have a background and a good looking list of all the employees that have checked in. (We use a card scanner to check in/out)


@Override
    public void paintComponent(Graphics g){
        super.paintComponent(g);
        Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D)g;
        //Rendering code
        repaint();
    }

But then I come to the thing I’m most questionable about, I have used a game loop to check in with a “in house” website now and then, to collect information. I have been thinking of adding a sleep, yield, or another kind of timer function.

public void processing(){
        while(isRunning){
            long now = System.currentTimeMillis();
            if(now-lastHttpCheck > getSoftwareRefreshRate()){
                lastHttpCheck = now;
                //Resive information from a in house apache server
            }
        }
    }