Help on Gui(Swing) design

Question

OK here is my situation:
Scenario:
I have a class i call mainwindow: it holds three other classes. TopPanel, midpanel, and bottompanel, all of which only hold your basic components(Jbuttons, JtextArea...so on). The main window just sets all these up and places them in the mainwindow. Also, i have another class called mainListener which implements an ActionListener which is its sole purpose is to react to actions. The important factor here is that whenever an item in the toppanel or midpanel performs an action, the action will put text on the bottom panels textArea.
My questions are:
1) Is this design practical? or is the overkill, too many class for one simple thing.
2) One problem i have been having is getting the class to talk to eachother, when i click on and item, the mainListener class does listen, but i can't return an action to the bottomPanel to write to its textarea. How do i make communication Happen.
3) One solution i thought about was to forget about the separate listener class, implement the listener directly on the mainWindow class, and finally use fully qualified names to reference to the separate object in the window.
Another solution i was thinking about is letting each of the individual class implement its own ActionListener interface, but how would i go about letting them communicate with each other?
If anyone has any suggestions, please share them with me. Any input to help in my design would be greatly appreaciated. Thanks in advanced.

Answer 1

In your bottom panel class, add a method which will receive the text and then add it to the JTextArea.
public void setBottomText(String s)
     myTextArea.setText(s);
}and call it from the listener class.
Mark