Data From GUI to Objects?

Question

Ive been doing a lot of reading and asking a lot of questions about a program Im trying to tackle. Ive broken it down to its most basic form. I have a GUI with two text fields and a button. There is a main class that creates the GUI class and a Student class with a name and grade member. The user enters the name and grade into the fields and clicks the button to save the data to the student object. Im starting to clear up some, but Im still a little confused on where the student class goes in relation to the GUI. Im clear on the fact that student should not be a member object of the GUI (no GUI -> Student), but how then does the info get into the student class if its not a member of the GUI:
My simple code so far has this snipet:
private void jButton1_actionPerformed(ActionEvent e)
student.setName(textField1.getText());
student.setGrade(textField2.getText());
But this only works if student is a member object of the GUI and thats a no no apparently, so how else can I get the info to student?

Answer 1

I made this to demonstrate:
1 - how the truck objects are separate from the gui,
2 - how to pass the truck references (eg, truck1, truck2,...) into the gui, and
3 - how these are used to query and change the truck objects.
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.*;
import javax.swing.*;
public class ClassTalk
    public static void main(String[] args)
        ShineyNewGUI gui = new ShineyNewGUI();
        ShineyNewPickupTruck truck1 = new ShineyNewPickupTruck("red");
        ShineyNewPickupTruck truck2 = new ShineyNewPickupTruck("yellow");
        ShineyNewPickupTruck truck3 = new ShineyNewPickupTruck("blue");
        ShineyNewPickupTruck truck4 = new ShineyNewPickupTruck("pink");
        ShineyNewPickupTruck[] fleet = { truck1, truck2, truck3, truck4 };
        gui.addTrucks(fleet);
class ShineyNewGUI
    ShineyNewPickupTruck[] trucks;
    ShineyNewPickupTruck selectedTruck;
    ShineyNewGUI()
        // north panel
        final JTextField colorField = new JTextField(12);
        colorField.addActionListener(new ActionListener()
            public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e)
                selectedTruck.setColor(colorField.getText());
        JPanel northPanel = new JPanel();
        northPanel.add(new JLabel("truck color  "));
        northPanel.add(colorField);
        // center panel
        final JLabel outputLabel = new JLabel(" ");
        JPanel panel = new JPanel();
        panel.add(outputLabel);
        // south panel
        final JTextField indexField = new JTextField(4);
        final JButton showColorButton = new JButton("show color");
        showColorButton.addActionListener(new ActionListener()
            public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e)
                // must be a number from [0 - 3]
                int index = Integer.parseInt(indexField.getText());
                selectedTruck = trucks[index];
                String truckColor = selectedTruck.color;
                outputLabel.setText("truck # " + index + " color = " + truckColor);
        JPanel southPanel = new JPanel();
        southPanel.add(new JLabel("truck #  "));
        southPanel.add(indexField);
        southPanel.add(showColorButton);
        JFrame f = new JFrame();
        f.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        f.getContentPane().add(northPanel, "North");
        f.getContentPane().add(panel);
        f.getContentPane().add(southPanel, "South");
        f.setSize(400,300);
        f.setLocation(200,200);
        f.setVisible(true);
    public void addTrucks(ShineyNewPickupTruck[] trucks)
        this.trucks = trucks;
class ShineyNewPickupTruck
    String color;
    public ShineyNewPickupTruck(String color)
        this.color = color;
    public void setColor(String color)
        this.color = color;
}