How To Structure a Swing Application

Question

I don\'t really have much experience with swing, or GUI design in general for that matter (a few WPF applications in university is about the height of it), however I have been t

Answer 1

What if you were to set up an abstract class that creates the 50% shared code, and then extend from that?

For example:

abstract class BasePopupPanel extends JPanel {

    public void initialize() {
        // Initialize all the shared code here.
        // eg. add(new JButton("TEST");
    }
}

And now you create the actual popup panels:

public class GiraffePopupPanel extends BasePopupPanel {

    public void initialize() {
        super.initialize();
        // Here you do all the initializations for this class.
    }
}

You can create as many of these as you would like. When it comes time to add them...

...let's say you have a method that is called displayPopup, then the signature would look like this:

public void displayPopup(BasePopupPanel popup) {
    // do stuff regarding JDialogs, etc.
    // ...
    popup.initialize();
    // do more stuff...
}

I hope that gives you one view on how you could refactor your classes.