Auto-generated Swing Code: jbInit()

Question

Hi,
I noticed that the auto-generated code for Swing apps directly uses class member variables, which is far from ideal. For example:
public class Screen {
    private JLabel boardingPassLabel = new JLabel();
    public void jbInit() {
        boardingPassLabel.setText("Boarding Pass");
        boardingPassLabel.setBounds(new Rectangle(170, 25, 115, 20));
        boardingPassLabel.setFont(new Font("Tahoma", 1, 12));
}The issue is that instantiating Screen will cause a JLabel to also be instantiated. While this is fine for a single screen and a single label, if there are hundreds of screens, each with twenty labels and buttons, it quickly gets out of hand.
It would be nice to see the following code auto-generated:
public class Screen {
    private JLabel boardingPassLabel;
    public void jbInit() {
        JLabel boardingPassLabel = getBoardingPassLabel();
        boardingPassLabel.setText("Boarding Pass");
        boardingPassLabel.setBounds(new Rectangle(170, 25, 115, 20));
        boardingPassLabel.setFont(new Font("Tahoma", 1, 12));
    public JLabel getBoardingPassLabel() {
      if( boardingPassLabel == null ) {
        boardingPassLabel = createBoardingPassLabel();
      return boardingPassLabel;
    protected JLabel createBoardingPassLabel() {
      return new JLabel();
}This allows subclasses to provide a different subclass of JLabel (if needed). It also means that there is little overhead to instantiating the Screen class. Thus if we had to instantiate 100 screens, each with 20+ widgets, there would be no performance hit.
As a work-around, we can simply not instantiate the Screen classes until just before they are used. This may not work in our situation, though.
Thoughts?
D

Answer 1

I should probably add a detail here.
We are running the Swing app on the CrEme JVM under Windows CE on a 520 MHz hand-held device with at most 256 MB of memory. (The specs say 520 MHz; but runs slower in practice.) Thus we need a lot more control over object instantiation, as has been described.
It would be nice to see a "use lazy initialization" checkbox for the auto-generated code. Or perhaps a "generate and use accessors" checkbox.
Note that the following code contains a redundancy:
    private JLabel boardingPassLabel = null;The assignemnt to null is superfluous; it adds about 50 more bytes to the final class size (using Sun's javac). It can be omitted for class member variables.
D