how can I kill a thread?

[tyler jones]

I have a thread executing inside of my applet and I've read that I shouldn't use the stop method of a thread to end it. Here's the scenario.
I have one main .asp page that is loaded with every other page. Inside of this .asp page is my applet. So, the applet gets loaded every time someone changes pages. I need to kill the thread and restart it every time the person changes pages. When a certain time has arrived, I show a message box alerting the person that the time has arrived. The problem is that right now, I'm using the applets stop method...

    public void stop() {
        if ( t != null )
        t = null;
    }

... to try and end the thread the way I read about. But it's not working. Is there another way to do it without resorting to the deprecated stop method of the thread? Thanks.

[Dirk Schreckmann]

Your stop method simple drops the reference to the already running thread (at least that's what I gather from your post). That doesn't actually stop anything, it just relies on the garbage collector to one day come around and clean things up; but who knows when the garbage collector will come?
Perhaps you want to redesign your thread a bit, so that it is performing inside of a while loop that constantly checks if it should keep running, and stops running when the check tests false.
Here's a potential outline for what I'm talking about:

class MyThread implements Runnable
{
    public void run() 
    {
        boolean continue = true ;
        
        while ( continue ) 
        {
            /* do stuff until I don't want 
               to do stuff, then... */
            continue = false ;
        }
    }
}