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Java Swing, 2nd Edition
book

Java Swing, 2nd Edition

by Dave Wood, Robert Eckstein, Marc Loy, James Elliott, Brian Cole
November 2002
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
1278 pages
38h 26m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Java Swing, 2nd Edition

The Model-View-Controller Architecture

Swing uses the model-view-controller architecture (MVC) as the fundamental design behind each of its components. Essentially, MVC breaks GUI components into three elements. Each of these elements plays a crucial role in how the component behaves.

Model

The model encompasses the state data for each component. There are different models for different types of components. For example, the model of a scrollbar component might contain information about the current position of its adjustable “thumb,” its minimum and maximum values, and the thumb’s width (relative to the range of values). A menu, on the other hand, may simply contain a list of the menu items the user can select from. This information remains the same no matter how the component is painted on the screen; model data is always independent of the component’s visual representation.

View

The view refers to how you see the component on the screen. For a good example of how views can differ, look at an application window on two different GUI platforms. Almost all window frames have a title bar spanning the top of the window. However, the title bar may have a close box on the left side (like the Mac OS platform), or it may have the close box on the right side (as in the Windows platform). These are examples of different types of views for the same window object.

Controller

The controller is the portion of the user interface that dictates how the component interacts with events. Events come ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596004087Errata PageSupplemental Content