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Java Event Handling

1. AWT event handling involves four types of classes: event sources, event classes, event listeners, and event adapters. 2. Common event sources include buttons, text fields, and frames. The events they generate belong to classes like ActionEvent and WindowEvent. 3. Listeners handle specific events, such as ActionListener for button clicks. The listener is registered to the source to receive its events. 4. Adapters provide default implementations for listeners to reduce coding complexity.

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Blue Rosace
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129 views

Java Event Handling

1. AWT event handling involves four types of classes: event sources, event classes, event listeners, and event adapters. 2. Common event sources include buttons, text fields, and frames. The events they generate belong to classes like ActionEvent and WindowEvent. 3. Listeners handle specific events, such as ActionListener for button clicks. The listener is registered to the source to receive its events. 4. Adapters provide default implementations for listeners to reduce coding complexity.

Uploaded by

Blue Rosace
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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In AWT components, we came to know every component (except Panel and Label) generates events when interacted by the

user like clicking over a button or pressing enter key in a text field etc. Listeners handle the events. Let us know the style (or design pattern) Java follows to handle the events. The event handling involves four types of classes. 1. Event Sources 2. Event classes 3. Event Listeners 4. Event Adapters 1. Event Sources Event sources are components, subclasses of java.awt.Component, capable to generate events. The event source can be a button, TextField or a Frame etc. 2. Event classes Almost every event source generates an event and is named by some Java class. For example, the event generated by button is known as ActionEvent and that ofCheckbox is known as ItemEvent. All the events are listed in java.awt.eventpackage. Following list gives a few components and their corresponding listeners.
Component Event it generates

Button, TextField, List, Menu Frame Checkbox, Choice, List Scrollbar Mouse (hardware) Keyboard (hardware)

ActionEvent WindowEvent ItemEvent AdjustmentEvent MouseEvent KeyEvent

The events generated by hardware components (like MouseEvent and KeyEvent) are known as low-level events and the events generated by software components (like Button, List) are known as semantic events. 3. Event Listeners

The events generated by the GUI components are handled by a special group of interfaces known as "listeners". Note, Listener is an interface. Every component has its own listener, say, AdjustmentListener handles the events of scrollbar Some listeners handle the events of multiple components. For example, ActionListenerhandles the events of Button, TextField, List and Menus. Listeners are fromjava.awt.event package. More description on listeners and list of listeners is available at Java AWT Listeners. 4. Event Adapters When a listener includes many abstract methods to override, the coding becomes heavy to the programmer. For example, to close the frame, you override seven abstract methods of WindowListener, in which, infact you are using only one method. To avoid this heavy coding, the designers come with another group of classes known as "adapters". Adapters are abstract classes defined in java.awt.event package. Every listener that has more than one abstract method has got a corresponding adapter class. More description on adapters and list of adapters is available at Java AWT Adapters. What happens internally at a button click? We know the events are handled by listeners and ActionListener handles the events of a button. Observe the following skeleton code.
public class ButtonDemo extends Frame implements ActionListener { public ButtonDemo() { Button btn = new Button("OK"); btn.addActionListener(this); add(btn); } public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { String str = e.getActionCommand(); } }

The above program contains a small part of event handling code of a big program, and is used here just for the explanation of internal event handling mechanism of Java. A button object btn is created for which events are yet to be linked. For this, the first step is implementing ActionListener to the class ButtonDemo. In the second step, we link or register the button btn with the ActionListener. For thisaddActionListener() method of Button class is used. The parameter "this" refers the ActionListener.
btn.addActionListener(this);

With the above statement, btn is linked with the ActionListener. 1. When the button btn is clicked, the button generates an event calledActionEvent. It is the nature of the button taken care by JVM. 2. This ActionEvent reaches the ActionListener because we registered the button with ActionListener earlier. 3. Now, the question is, what ActionListener does with the ActionEvent object it received? The ActionListener simply calls actionPerformed() method and passes the ActionEvent object to the parameter as follows.
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e)

The parameter for the above method comes from ActionListener. 4. Finally the ActionEvent object generated by the button btn reaches the e object of ActionEvent. All this is done by JVM implicitly. For this reason, thegetActionCommand() method of ActionEvent class knows the label of the buttonbtn.
String str = e.getActionCommand();

The e represents an object of ActionEvent and the value for the e is coming from button btn. str is nothing but the label of the button OK

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