Design Patterns Java™ Workbook

Chapter 18. Prototype

Consider copying an OzTextArea object. When you investigate this class, you see that it is
a subclass of JPanel, as Figure 18.2 shows.

Figure 18.2. The OzTextArea class inherits a large number of methods and variables

from its superclasses.

Subclassing from JPanel lets OzTextArea objects uniformly wrap their contents in a
scrolling panel and a standard border. This makes text panels in the GUI more appealing, but
it also has the effect of giving OzTextArea objects a huge number of instance variables,
including those that OzTextArea declares and all those that OzTextArea inherits from its
superclasses.

A GUI object can easily have more than 100 instance variables. These attributes often include
dependencies on other objects and on operating system resources that you cannot safely copy