🚀 go-pugleaf

Paul King wrote:

> I am not necessarily new to Java, but am a novice at writing GUI-based
> Java programs.
>
> ...
> 
>     txtMessage.text = "Some text";
> 
> hoping it would appear as displayed text in the text pane. The logic of
> using txtMessage.text is that the "text" part appears as a property on my
> CodeWarrior object inspector for the "txtMessage" object. Giving the
> "text" property a value in the object inspector results in that value
> being displayed.

Well, sorry - but "did you hear about beans??". With a bean there might
be a property 'text' and access to it is granted using accessor methods
'getText' and/or 'setText'. this is a common pattern to all beans - and
Swing components are supposed to be beans, too.
No Java style guide misses a phrases stating that the above way (direct
access to class members) is to be dropped from coding practices.
Well, I don't think that it is that seriously wrong, but you might consider
the accessor way - that btw is the way that (almost) every IDE GUI Tool
should do it by recommendation.

btw. i agree to the other posting by "gbp" about using the getDocument()
method for components like JTextPane as JTextPane may encapsulate large
text objects - highlighting and other stuff - like Win$ Write.exe...
given proper coding ;-)
but the text property is not isolated to JTextPane and if you would like
to access anything else having a text property (eg. JButton) please stick
to the accessor. and also the accessor might hide implementations to
update components in the background by calling whatever is necessary to do
so. accessing the member directly would need you to do so and thus involve
dependencies you might not be aware of --- the saying goes: use accessors
where available...

Cheers

Jens