Experience with the Reflection API is necessary to modify or extend the five utility classes provided in this article. Except for DocumentEvent , the rest of the events derive from the java.util.EventObject class. In JDK 1.2, there are 49 listeners and only 9 adapters. Adapters cannot be used if the implementing class has to derive from some other class. Many developers use object diagrams to understand the interconnections between different types of objects.
Many IDEs automatically generate object diagrams from the source code.
These diagrams help developers understand applications quickly without getting lost in implementation details. Most of the time, after generating the object diagrams, developers go back to remove inner class objects from the diagram to improve clarity. Some IDEs generate too much boilerplate code to connect GUI components with event handler methods. Large amounts of glue code results in code bloat and large class files, which is a definite concern for applets. Due to the backward compatibility requirements of compiler specifications, inner and anonymous classes result in a large applet or application footprint.