An event typically signifies an action by the user, such as striking a key or clicking the mouse over a JButton component. But it can also refer to any other action performed by the user or the program. An event can be generated when the value of component's property changes or when a specified amount of time elapses.
Almost all programs must respond to commands from the user in order to be useful. Java's AWT uses event driven programming to achieve processing of user actins: one that underlies all modern window systems programming. Within the AWT, all user actions belong to an abstract set of things called events. An event describes, in sufficient detail, a particular user action. Rather than the program actively collecting user-generated events, the Java run time notifies the program when an interesting event occurs. Programs that handle user interaction in this fashion are said to be event driven.
There are three parts to the event model in Java:
Event object - this is an instance of a Java class that contains the characteristics of the event. For example, if the event is generated from clicking a mouse button, the event object would contain information such as the coordinates of the mouse cursor, which button was clicked, how many times it was clicked, etc.
Dispatching class/method - this is an object, which detects that an event has occurred and is then responsible for notifying other objects of the event, passing the appropriate event object to those objects. These other objects are "listeners" for the event. Most AWT components, such as Button, List, Textfield, etc. are examples of dispatching classes.
A Button, for instance, is capable of notifying other components when it is "pushed." These classes will typically have a set of two methods that can be invoked by would-be "listeners": one to tell the class that the object wants to listen and another to tell the class that the object no longer wants to listen.
These methods are conventionally named i.e. addxxListener (to add an object as a listener) or removexxListener (to remove the object as a listener).In the case of the Button, this would be "Action" to indicate the action of pushing the button. (So the methods would be addActionListener and removeActionListener).
Listener Interface - for the dispatching to work properly, the dispatching class must be able to rely on each of its listeners to contain the method that it executes when the event occurs. This is easily accomplished in Java through the use of an Interface class. The important point is that a class, which is going to be a listener, must implement that interface
Event Objects:-
Different types of events are represented by different Java classes. The base class, from which all events inherit, is java.util.EventObject. AWT defines its own base class for GUI events, java.awt.AWTEvent, which is subclassed from EventObject. AWT then defines a number of subclasses of AWTEvent in the package java.awt.event. Swing uses many of these event types and also defines more of its own in the javax.swing.event package. Some Swing events subclass AWT events, but many subclass java.util.EventObject directly. There is one other kind of event used by Swing components: the java.beans.PropertyChangeEvent, which is part of the JavaBeans component model.
The base EventObject class defines a getSource() method that returns the object that generated or triggered the event. AWTEvent defines the getID() method; the value returned by this method is used to distinguish the various types of events that are represented by the same event class. For example, FocusEvent has two possible types: FocusEvent.FOCUS_GAINED and FocusEvent.FOCUS_LOST.
In addition to these getSource() and getID() methods, the various event subclasses define methods to return whatever data values are pertinent to the particular event type. For example, MouseEvent has getX(), getY(), and getClickCount() methods; it also inherits the getModifiers() and getWhen() methods, among others, from its superclass InputEvent. Thus, when the user clicks the mouse, you receive a MouseEvent that specifies where, when, and how many times the user clicked, along with other information, such as the set of keyboard modifier keys that were held down at the time.
Event Listeners:-
An object that would like to be notified of and respond to an event is an event listener. An object that generates a particular kind of event, called an event source, maintains a list of listeners that are interested in being notified when that kind of event occurs. The event source provides methods that allow listeners to add and remove themselves from this list of interested objects. When the event source generates an event (or when a user input event such as a mouse click or a key press occurs on the event source object), the event source notifies all the listener objects that the event has occurred.
All AWT and Swing components are event sources, and all of them define (or inherit) methods for adding and removing event listeners. By convention, these methods have names that begin with "add" or "remove" and end with "Listener". So, for example, the JButton class inherits the addActionListener() and removeActionListener() methods. In the reference section of this book, you'll notice that the event registration methods of a component are grouped separately, just as the property accessor methods are. This is because one of the most important things you need to know about a component is the list of event types that it can generate.
Each type of event object typically has a corresponding event listener type. The ActionEvent event type has an ActionListener listener type, for example. Event listeners, such as ActionListener, are interfaces that extend java.util.EventListener. EventListener doesn't define any methods; it is merely a marker interface that gives all event listeners a common type. An event listener interface defines one or more methods that an event source may invoke when a particular type of event occurs. Such a method always takes an event object as its single argument. For example, the ActionListener interface defines a single method, actionPerformed(). When the user clicks on a JButton component, an ActionEvent representing that click is created and passed to the actionPerformed() method of each ActionListener object that was registered on the JButton with the addActionListener() method.
An event listener interface may define more than one method. For example, MouseListener defines several methods that correspond to different types of mouse events, including button press events and button release events. This is because MouseEvent represents several different types of mouse events. By convention, each method of an event listener is passed a single argument that is an event object of the type that corresponds to the listener. Thus, a MouseEvent object is always created when a mouse event occurs, but the object is passed to a different listener method depending on the type of mouse event that occurred.
Event Adapters:-
When an event listener interface defines more than one method, it is often accompanied by an event adapter class that provides empty implementations for each of the methods. For example, the MouseListener interface defines five different methods. If your program is interested only in the mouseClicked() method, it may be easier for you to subclass the MouseAdapter class and override mouseClicked() than to implement all five methods of the MouseListener interface directly.
