7.6 Inside the Java 1.1 Event Model

The listener-based event model we've seen in the sections above is ideal for creating a GUI out of pre-defined AWT components or out of Java Beans. It becomes a little cumbersome, however, when developing custom AWT components. AWT components (but not beans) provide a lower-level interface to this event model that is sometimes more convenient to use.

When an AWTEvent is delivered to a component, there is some default processing that goes on before the event is dispatched to the appropriate event listeners. When you define a custom component (by subclassing), you have the opportunity to override methods and intercept the event before it is sent to listener objects. When an AWTEvent is delivered to a component, it is passed to the processEvent() method.

By default, processEvent() simply checks the class of the event object and dispatches the event to a class-specific method. For example, if the event object is an instance of FocusEvent, it dispatches it to a method named processFocusEvent(). Or, if the event is of type ActionEvent, it is dispatched to processActionEvent(). In other words, any event type XEvent is dispatched to a corresponding processXEvent() method. The exception is for MouseEvent events, which are dispatched either to processMouseEvent() or processMouseMotionEvent(), depending on the type of the mouse event that occurred. For any given component, it is the individual processXEvent() methods that are responsible for invoking the appropriate methods of all registered event listener objects. The processMouseEvent() method, for example, invokes the appropriate method for each registered MouseListener object. There is a one-to-one mapping between these methods and the event listener interfaces defined in java.awt.event. Each processXEvent() method corresponds to an XListener interface.

As you can see, there is a clear analogy between the Java 1.0 event model and this Java 1.1 low-level event model. processEvent() is analogous to the Java 1.0 handleEvent() method, and methods like processKeyEvent() are analogous to the Java 1.0 keyDown() and keyUp() methods. As with the Java 1.0 model, there are two levels at which you can intercept events: you can override processEvent() itself or you can rely on the default version of processEvent() to dispatch the events based on their class and instead override the individual event methods, such as processFocusEvent() and processActionEvent().

There is one additional requirement to make this low-level Java 1.1 event model work. In order to receive events of a particular type for a component, you must tell the component that you are interested in receiving that type of event. If you do not do this, for efficiency, the component does not bother to deliver that type of event. When using event listeners, the act of registering a listener is enough to notify the component that you are interested in receiving events of that type. But when you use the low-level model, you must register your interest explicitly. You do this by calling the enableEvents() method of the component and passing a bit mask that specifies each of the event types you are interested in. The bit mask is formed by ORing together various EVENT_MASK constants defined by the AWTEvent class.

import java.applet.*;
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
public class Scribble4 extends Applet {
  private int lastx, lasty;
  /** Tell the system we're interested in mouse events, mouse motion events,
   *  and keyboard events.  This is required or events won't be sent.
   */
  public void init() {
    this.enableEvents(AWTEvent.MOUSE_EVENT_MASK |
                      AWTEvent.MOUSE_MOTION_EVENT_MASK |
                      AWTEvent.KEY_EVENT_MASK);
    this.requestFocus();  // Ask for keyboard focus so we get key events.
  }
  /** Invoked when a mouse event of some type occurs */
  public void processMouseEvent(MouseEvent e) {
    if (e.getID() == MouseEvent.MOUSE_PRESSED) {  // Check the event type.
      lastx = e.getX(); lasty = e.getY();
    }
    else super.processMouseEvent(e); // Pass unhandled events to superclass.
  }
  /** Invoked when a mouse motion event occurs */
  public void processMouseMotionEvent(MouseEvent e) {
    if (e.getID() == MouseEvent.MOUSE_DRAGGED) {  // check type
      int x = e.getX(), y = e.getY();
      Graphics g = this.getGraphics();
      g.drawLine(lastx, lasty, x, y);
      lastx = x; lasty = y;
    }
    else super.processMouseMotionEvent(e);
  }
  /** Called on key events:  clear the screen when 'c' is typed. */
  public void processKeyEvent(KeyEvent e) {
    if ((e.getID() == KeyEvent.KEY_TYPED) && (e.getKeyChar() == 'c')) {
      Graphics g = this.getGraphics();
      g.setColor(this.getBackground());
      g.fillRect(0, 0, this.getSize().width, this.getSize().height);
    }
    else super.processKeyEvent(e);  // Pass unhandled events to our superclass.
  }
}