Why shouldn't you extend JFrame and other components?

java swing inheritance components
Thomas Owens picture Thomas Owens · Jul 17, 2009 · Viewed 12.7k times · Source

I've seen this come up here a few times, but in the postings I've seen, no one explained it. Why shouldn't I extend JFrame (or any component)? Are there conditions where I should extend a component, or is this a firm rule that you don't?

Answer

Yishai picture Yishai · Jul 17, 2009

Generally speaking, extending the component tends to be done strictly to use the component. This severely limits your options in unnecessary ways in terms of design, so that your classes can't extend different classes, you can't hide the JFrame's methods causing it to be more difficult to maintain and easier to trigger unexpected bugs when using the class.

Typically the intention is strictly to use the class to draw a frame, and composition is preferred over inheritance.

That being said, subclassing should be fine when you intend your subclass to add project-specific functionality to the Frame (such as convenience methods and the like) where the subclass would be used instead of the Frame itself, but used as a frame in general, not as a view of a specific frame in the application.

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