Defining non-Component objects with size and location using Swing

Question

I am attempting to write a program which will be able to manipulate (display, move, resize) objects in a Swing window which are not necessarily components. These "Window"s are defined by a Window interface which defines a Window as any object which has a size and a location (effectively a rectangular area). This would ideally allow me to perform operations such as drawing an arbitrary picture on a Jpanel, for example, wrap that drawing in a rectangular area, and then be able to resize it/move it about as a separate panel. In order to do this I believe I would have to override the paint() method, although I'm not completely sure. If anyone has any suggestions of a proper way to override the method or know a proper way to attack this problem, I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks,
Adrian

Answer 1

It's hard to say since it's not quite clear what you're doing but:
1) if these objects are not necessarily components, that's fine, but you're not trying to add them to the basic GUI framework, are you? If you want to do something like this, then probably the best thing is to have a particular component that knows how to handle these objects, and then have a clean separation between components and non-components at that level. So this component would maintain and display a collection of those non-component objects, but no other component would be expected to know anything about them, and the non-component objects wouldn't know about any components at all.
2) it might be helpful to give all the non-component objects a method that looks like this:
void drawSelf(Graphics g);and that this method would tell the object to draw itself on that Graphics object. The object might also have an "offset" value, essentially an x,y position, and it would draw itself relative to that position.