I'm relatively new to processing.  I got a little help with a code via e-mail today but the solution to my problem involved using a "worker thread".  I am not familiar with this term and did not find much info searching the forum.  Could one of you offer a general explanation of what this term means and how it is applied to a processing sketch??

 

Here is a snipet of the message.  It makes rough sense to me but I dont understand it well enough to implement it into my own sketches.  If a worker thread is nothing more than a seperate function then I don't see how putting the delay mentioned below there would change anything since the program would just branch off into that function and run the delay anyways.

 

 

[MESSAGE]:

 

 

I just quickly looked into your code, but the main problem for your
speed problem is that you have a delay in your drawing loop.
This way you slowdown your sketch pretty bad(by 111ms every frame) !
Check out your method PointDrawer.draw():

if(firstVec != null)
{
strokeWeight(8);
context.convertRealWorldToProjective(firstVec,screenPos);
point(screenPos.x,screenPos.y);
velocity= 150-int(screenPos.y)/3; pitch = int(screenPos.x)/5-3;
print(screenPos.y); print(" Y ");println(velocity);
print(screenPos.x); print(" X");println(pitch);
myBus.sendNoteOn(channel, pitch, velocity);
// Send a Midi noteOn
delay(111); <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< not a good idea
myBus.sendNoteOff(channel, pitch, velocity); // Send a Midi
nodeOff
}

in case you want to send of a note without delaying the rendering/ data
processing part, i would suggest that you use a
simple worker thread which just waits to send of those notes. From the
SimpleOpenNI thread you just give a message to
the worker thread(which only waits for those events), the worker thread
then sends you the notes.
The worker thread just has a stack/list/queue of commands(like the note
off/on, channel, pitch, velocity, timestamp etc.), in the main loop of
this thread you just send out those commands, depending on their timestamp.
For example, this could be the command:
sendNote(int sendTimeOffset, boolean noteOnOffMode, int channel,
int pitch, int velocity)

in the code:
sendNote(0,true,channel,pitch,velocity);
sendNote(111,false,channel,pitch,velocity);

The command would write those infos into a queue in your working thread.
In this way you have no interruption in your drawing thread and you can
send of that many notes you want, without any delay.