Question

We are going to use Swing for our next project which will be a lightweight desktop app.

I’ve been reading the Swing tutorials on Oracle’s website and have started to get the hang of it.

I was told that instead of switching JFrame I need to work within one JFrame and switch JPanels.

My questions to you would be the following.

Can I create the JPanel designs (or their templates) in design mode (WYSIWYG editor) and call jframe.setContentPane(nameOfJPanel) or do I do them programatically in code?

Secondly, how do I structure my code… If I dynamically add new JPanels and bind their events to an event handler.. all my logic and code will be in one HUGE class with tens of methods. I just don’t know how to proceed and nowhere can I find an example with multiple (more than 6 let’s say) panels on the internet.

Answer 1

This is how I organize my code:

class Panel1 extends JPanel{
   //code for panel1 and its Components
}

class Panel2 extends JPanel{
   //code for panel2 and its components
}
// and it follows. 
class ApplicationFrame extends JFrame{
    /// LOGIC to switch between panels
}

class Main{
  //contains main() function
}

Any HAND-CRAFTED GUI code, is better than a COMPUTER GENERATED WYSIWYG -APP Code.