Reusing Swing components which are time-consuming to initialize

If I have a massive Swing component in my application which takes a long time to initialize, and want to display this component in different places in my GUI at the same time, how would I preferably do this?

The GUI user must be able开发者_如何学JAVA to interact with the different copies of the component (they could, for example, work as mirrors).

Let's assume that one might want to display copies of this component dynamically, depending on the input of the GUI user (that is, we do not want pre-loading of many copies of the same component).

You need to change your components to access data in a model-view like fashion. Each component would need to point to the same model that would server up the data and do the intensive task once rather than multiple times.

Also, initialization is slowing the GUI, then it sounds like you need a splash screen or a progress bar and the task moved off the EDT.

Is there any way that you could pull the heavy-duty initialization code out, maybe into a '...Factory' class?

I would create a one instance of the component (let's say HeavyComponent) and a custom class extending e.g. JPanel and referencing the component. Let's name it MyContainer. On paintComponent() of the MyContainer I would draw original component into a BufferedImage or use heavyComponentReference.paint(g). Then on click by the MyContainer I would swap the component replacing the panel with real instance of HeavyComponent and placing in the old location of the HeavyComponent new instance of MyContainer.

display this component in different places in my GUI at the same time ... without having to create a new copy of the same component ... user must be able to interact with the different copies

No way.