GUI Photo Album basic help

Question

Hi, I'm making a Photo Album program with a vertical split pane with picture on top and controls on the bottom. I have a text document with the names of pictures I want to display in it. I don't know how to have pictures in a panel at all, or how to get the files from the text doc. I know how to do a ActionListener kind of, but I'm pretty lost.
    public PhotoAlbum()
    super("Photo Album");
        ResourceBundle imageResource;
        JButton next = new JButton("Next");
        JButton prev   = new JButton("Previous");
    a = new JPanel(new FlowLayout());
        a.add(prev);
        a.add(next);
    b = new JPanel();
        b.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(800, 500));
    c = new JSplitPane(JSplitPane.VERTICAL_SPLIT, b, a);   
        c.setOneTouchExpandable(true);
    setContentPane(c);
    }Sorry if I have deformed looking code, and thanks for the help!

Answer 1

Yeah, I guess you could use a JLabel. I don't use Swing much. Though from reading the docs, it sounds like JLabel is supposed to print small, well, labels, and not large images. But maybe you can use it for that anyway.
"State" is information that expresses the current and ongoing behavior of an object. So for a photo display component, the state could be all images it knows to display, and the one image its currently displaying.
I suppose you could subclass JLabel to get its functionality, and then add the state to the subclass. But maybe that's not how one does things in Swing. I get the impression that it would be more typical to put that state somewhere else, and then just set the JLabel's image value. That's not very object-oriented but it seems typical.
It looks like JLabels use an Icon object, where Icon is an interface that apparently just knows how to report its size and how to draw itself. It looks like Icon is meant for small images (e.g., icons) only, but so is JLabel so if you're going to use that for a big image you might as well do the same for Icon.
So what you could do is, you could make a class that implements Icon, and which holds the state about images. Then put it in a JLabel, and then put the JLabel in the upper panel.
I don't know what you mean by the last question. The BufferedReader knows how to read a character stream (e.g., file contents) one line at a time. If each line names an image, you'd then have an easy way to get the names of image files. Once you do that, you can use the name to load the image into an Image object, and put each Image object into an array or a java.util.List. You can use the javax.imageio.ImageIO class to load images by name. The BufferedReader wouldn't worry about the indices of the array holding the images; that's not its job.