Connecting an editor to a visualizer

Thanks Mark. I spent some time looking at the Savable interface, something like that looks like just what I need. But it looks like implementing a similar "Highlightable" interface would require quite a bit of code.

There must still be gaps in my NBP understanding, so I'd like to go through this selection tutorial sometime soon:
https://platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/nbm-selection-1.html

For now, I ended up finding a much simpler solution using a Guava EventBus (https://github.com/google/guava/wiki/EventBusExplained) to provides the same level of decoupling (minus the contextual selection information).

In my interface module I have two small classes to provide the interface and the bus:

Code:

@ServiceProvider(service=HighlightEventBus.class)
public class HighlightEventBus extends EventBus {
}





Code:

public class HighlightEvent {
    Collection<Integer> lines;
    public HighlightEvent(Collection<Integer> lines) {
        this.lines = lines;
    }    

    public Collection<Integer> getLines() {
        return lines;
    }
}




Now in my "Editor" class I can publish highlight events:

Code:

public class EditorListener implements CaretListener {
    @Override
    public void caretUpdate(CaretEvent e) {
           ...

            EventBus eb = Lookup.getDefault().lookup(HighlightEventBus.class);
            if (eb != null) {
                eb.post(new HighlightEvent(selectedLines));
            }
        }
    }
}




And in my Visualizer I register my class:

Code:

        EventBus eb = Lookup.getDefault().lookup(HighlightEventBus.class);
        if (eb != null) {
            eb.register(listenerObject);
        }





And hook up the "listener" method:

Code:

    @Subscribe
    public void highlightEventListener(HighlightEvent he) {
        gcodeRenderer.setHighlightedLines(he.getLines());
        gcodeRenderer.forceRedraw();
    }