Swing Events - Introduction

Here is a brief overview of how events work in Swing. This is from the IBM Swing Beginner Tutorial and is an important fundamental when learning Swing:

Events

Finally, we get to one of the most important parts of Swing: dealing with events and reacting to interaction with the UI. Swing handles events by using the event/listener model. This model works by allowing certain classes to register for events from a component. This class that registers for events is called a listener, because it waits for events to occur from the component and then takes an action when that happens. The component itself knows how to "fire" events (that is, it knows the types of interaction it can generate and how to let the listeners know when that interaction happens). It communicates this interaction with events, classes that contain information about the interaction.

With the technical babble aside, let's look at some examples of how events work in Swing. I'll start with the simplest example, a JButton and printing out "Hello" on the console when it is pressed.

The JButton knows when it is pressed; this is handled internally, and there's no code needed to handle that. However, the listener needs to register to receive that event from the JButton so you can print out "Hello." The listener class does this by implementing the listener interface and then calling addActionListener() on the JButton.