Question

I wanted to ask for a tip. How would you struct your application if you had a JFrame with many JPanels which have like ten JTextFields Labels, and an Edit Button.

Would you put all the code in the JFrame or would you extend from JPanel and include all of them in the JFrame?

What about the buttons? I want to use the MVC pattern, how would you handle the actionlisteners? Are each of them an own controller or would you use only one controller for all of them?

Answer 1

I think it’s first of all a question of style and personal preference. It also depends on what your application should do and how.

If your JPanels all are very similar in a certain way it would probably make sense to extend from JPanel. For example if every panel had 10 Buttons where Button 1 does always action xyz() for its corresponding model-object (especially when this object is the same for all buttons of 1 JPanel) and Button 2 does abc() …

If the JPanels are not strongly correlated in such a way I would place my code rather in the JFrame or in a third Object which sets the whole GUI up from outside.

It’s similar with the actionlisteners. If you have very few actions I would probably go for just one controller-object for ease of use (not many files). If you have a lot of different actions I would group similar actions into one controller-object per group of actions.

That said it probably is best to start with a simple approach (YAGNI) where you do everything from the JFrame / third object and have one actionlistener and then refactor when you feel that splitting things up gives you a cleaner or more flexible design.