Question

In a Swing application, what is the best way to send data (interact) between two views?

Looking at the Coupling session in the Study Guide to the SCJP 6, it says:

All nontrivial OO applications are a mix of many classes and
interfaces working together. Ideally, all interactions between objects
in an OO system should use the APIs, in other words, the contracts, of
the objects’ respective classes.

If I understood this correct, the better way would be create interfaces (contracts) to each view, and if needed use this interfaces methods to retrieve data. Is this a good way? Spending a good time creating a lot of interfaces to say what is exposed by a view is ok?

Another way that I think is to have classes to hold the data (Model) of a view. In this case, is a good approach access directly this model classes?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The notion of a separable model pervades Swing, as outlined in A Swing Architecture Overview. Typically, each model is represented by an interface; a few include an AbstractXxxModel with some basic event plumbing; and many have a DefaultXxxModel with a standard implementation.