MVC - Organizing models and managing GUI windows

Question

I'm having difficulty organizing my MVC models and basically controlling the whole application in general. My application works, but all the controlling logic is being dumped into the main class (Main.java). Here's a simple example of the problem I'm having:
Objectives
1) Display a list of Companies; i.e. Sun, Microsoft, Adobe, etc. (JFrame with a JList)
2) The user select a Company and it pops up a new dialog with a list of Employees. (JDialog with a JList)
Here are the classes I came up with:
Models:
1) CompanyListModel
2) EmployeeListModel
Listeners:
1) CompanyListener
Views:
1) CompanyListFrame
2) EmployeeListDialog
Domain Objects:
1) Company
2) Employee
And then there's the main application class. To implement the above objective, I've been using my main class to control the GUI.
Here's an example of how I've implemented it.
public class Main implements CompanyListener {
    /** Creates a new instance of Main */
    public Main() {
        CompanyListModel companyModel = new CompanyListModel();
        companyModel.addCompanyListener(this);
        CompanyListFrame gui = new CompanyListFrame(companyModel);
    // A company was selected.  Open a new dialog and display the employees
    public void companySelected(CompanyModel companyModel) {
        Company company = companyModel.getCompany();
        EmployeeListModel employeeModel = new EmployeeListModel(company));
        EmployeeListDialog = new EmployeeListDialog(employeeModel);
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new Main();
}My program is similiar design wise to the above, but contains many more classes. I'm still using my main class to control GUI logic (popping up new windows and creating models, etc). Thus, my main class implements like 5 different listeners. I'm sure this is a really poor design choice, I just don't know how else to implement it.
I should not nest models... correct? I was thinking about nesting the models, i.e. CompanyListModel contains an EmployeeListModel, but then the CompanyListModel will need to spawn the EmployeeListDialog when a Company is selected, right? Thus, I'd be mixing the view with the model.
Please provide some advice! :( Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm sorry, I read your reply about 3 times and I've
spent the last 20 minutes trying to implement it.
I'm just not sure how the controllers are involved.
Could you possibly provide source code for the
controllers (and any part of the models / views that
communicate with the controller)?No source code. Read about the MVC pattern.
I feel like this is a wasted effort. I'm the sole
entry level programmer at my company and I have only
one year real wold experience . I work with about 10
other senior level (microsoft) programmers and none
of them code in this fashion. All of our
applications are desktop applications using C#,
C/C++, or scripting languages.What's a wasted effort? You posting a question? Me posting a response? You writing Java? You trying to think about how to do this properly?
So why are you using Java if you're in a Microsoft shop? How's this working out with your co-workers?
I feel like if I worked on a project with one of
them, they would criticize me for using MVC and
"complicating" such a simple issue.That's usually because Microsoft likes tying a particular text box to a column in a table. If you change the textbox value you change the database. Nice and easy, right?
In trying to implement this solution, my workspace
now has a huge load of classes for something so
simple:
Company
CompanyFrame
CompanyListController
CompanyListListener
CompanyListModel
CompanyListPanel
Employee
EmployeeListDialog
EmployeeListModel
EmployeeListPanel
Main
11 classes and I left out the Emp Controller and
Listener to simplify the example. The more classes
that you have, the slower the application startup
time. Moving the Views to JPanels as you suggested
seemed smart but it wound up making it more
difficult. I'm using NetBeans and Matisse and I
don't believe you can use another JPanel class in the
GUI editor unless you make it a bean.
Traditionally, I would have implemented as follows.
I would have completed it in 5 minutes and it would
be much easier to understand what's going on:
Company
CompanyFrame - contains a list of companies
Employee
EmployeeListDialog - contains a list of employees
Main
Of course doing it this way I'd be mixing data with
the view, but is that always a bad thing or is it
only bad for large scale applications? Should MVC
not be used for small modules like this?For small modules that are nothing more the CRUD operations, it might be that a simpler approach is fine. (PS - CRUD stands for Create/Read/Update/Delete, standard relational operations on tables. I'm not commenting on you or your code.)
It only becomes a problem when that "simple" CRUD application decides to branch into something bigger. The approach of mingling view and data can become problematic then.
It's still possible to have a clean application for small apps. I think most Microsoft programmers do it that way because the wizards and stuff they're used only allow it to be done that way.
The reasons why I'm going away from my old "academic"
programming practices is:
1) I want to become a better programmer of course!Kudos to you. At least you're still thinking about it.
2) There's alot of database queries in this
application so I wanted to separate that from the GUI
as much as possible. Thus, each model knows how to
query the database and it's all done on separate
threads.That's good motivation, too.
I'd really like to do this right. If you could
provide source that would be great. Also, are there
any good books on desktop GUI development geared
towards Java (or even C#)?I don't write for the desktop, so I'm not much help.
I already purchased the e-book Desktop Java Live,
which is great but they don't go into detail about
MVC and instead use Model-Presenter which has been
retired (according to Fowlers website). I found that
section fairly confusing so I figured I'd start with
MVC since it's more widespread (?).If you're reading Martin Fowler you're doing well.
Thank you.I'm sorry that I'm not more helpful.
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