How to address a component in a background tab in a JTabbedPane

Question

Hello and greetings for everybody, this is my first post here. I have a question:
I want to write a simple little chat program, which makes use of a JTabbedpane, and if the user gets a private message from another user, it would open a new tab with the given user's nick in the tab title, and would create a JTextArea on the opened tab and write the message to that specific JTextarea. My question: Is it possible to write on the JTextarea, while the given tab is in the background? How can I address that specific JTextarea on the specified tab?
Thank you very much in advance for the answers, and I wis you all a nice day!

Answer 1

// create a Map<String, JTextArea>
public static void privMsg(String nick) {
        if (mainwindow.tabpane.indexOfTab(nick)==-1) {  // look for the nick in the map, not on the tabbedpane (if map.get(nick) != null
            javax.swing.JScrollPane panel=new javax.swing.JScrollPane();
            javax.swing.JTextArea msgBox=new javax.swing.JTextArea();
            msgBox.setEditable(false);
            msgBox.setAutoscrolls(true);
            msgBox.setLineWrap(true);
            panel.setViewportView(msgBox);
            mw.tabpane.addTab(nick,panel);
            mw.tabpane.setSelectedIndex(mw.tabpane.indexOfTab(nick));
            msgBox.append("Private conversation: "+nick+"\n");
            // add the nick and the msgBox to the map
        // if the nick already has been added to the map, (meaning there's already a tab open for that nick), then get that textpane and write to it. That's the basic idea behind MVC, which you'd do yourself a huge favor by reading into. You separate the display of the data from the data itself. That way when you update the data (Model), you don't have to deal with gui code (View). The actions the user takes are also separated into the Controller.