Re: Swing and anonymous inner classes

Steven F. Toth wrote:
> A question to this forum, since you are mostly writing Swing Gui code.   
> Do you create many anonymous inner classes to handle events and  
> invokeLater calls?

First, I did just that. It is convenient if you have to write a few, 
*small* inner classes to get things done. But if things get bigger and 
more difficult, this is IMHO the wrong approach. Especially with swixml 
where having and not having a certain GUI element is only a matter of a 
(few) lines of XML-Code.

So my procedure is to write Action derivates to have them assigned to 
buttons, menus and the like. These actions are mostly on their own -- at 
least in respect to other actions. They do one job, nothing more, 
nothing less. If I want to get rid of an action, I just remove the 
defining class and remove the reference to it from the Xml. These Action 
classes are quite small and thus easy to maintain.

> And if so, do you think that having an easier way  
> to access methods via reflection would be a bonus?  So that instead of  
> having to create a new anonymous inner class for every little event  
> handler, you just have it redirect to a class method for example.

I'm aware this was only given as example but often the code really looks 
that way. I remember vividly a monster class with about 20 or 30 
doXxxx() methods doing just that. This monster was impossilbe to 
maintain and every developer was afraid to do so ;). So we split this 
thing up into the several (20 to 30) action classes after we removed the 
dependencies to the outer class by isolating code. A relief, I might tell...

Just my 2 Cent...

Frank

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