Graph/Diagram editor.. any ideas?

Question

Hi everybody,
I am writing a simple program where the user should be able to manipulate (add, delete, rename, move etc) the nodes ("points") and edges ("lines connecting the points") of a graph / diagram. Do you have any ideas to help me and which should be the best way to do this ?
My idea so far is to write a class that models a node and another class that models an edge and these classes have color, background, labels, location on the screen as attributes. The node class also has a method called draw(Graphics g) which draws the node on the screen. Same for the edge class. However, I also want to have some sort of action listening...when the user clicks on a node or an edge an event should triggered.. Do you have any ideas on how to do this ?

Answer 1

So what's your opinion on the code below ?
and how do I give this component the ability to have action listener so that I can say later in my code something like node.addActionListener(...).
// Node.java
import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.*;
public class Node extends JComponent
     private Integer number;
     private String label;
     private Color background;
     public Node(Integer n, String s, Point p, Color b)
          number = n;
          label = s;
background = b;
     public void paintComponent(Graphics page)
// do the drawing and stuff
     page.drawOval(1, 1 , 30, 30);
     public void setNumber(Integer num) { number = num;  }
     public void setLabel(String lab) { label = lab;   }     
     public void setColour(Color c) { background = c;}
     public Integer getNumber() { return number; }
     public String getLabel() { return label;  }
     public Color getColor() { return background; }
Message was edited by:
Seabass