Need Help on monitoring progresses

i have a function (actionPerformed) that takes a lot of time. hence i decided to display some message to the user in a text area in a JFrame. Here am trying to display some messages in the text area as long as the process is being done. but the problem am facing is that after using setText to set the new message in the text area..am not able to see it on the screen. i tried using repaint and refresh on both the text areas and the jframe. but it didnt work.

does anyone have a solution for this?

[526 byte] By [anande99] at [2007-9-26 3:14:13]