Lukas Degener wrote: Hi, There is a good technical article explaining its architecture at: http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/articles/architecture/index.html Swing is based completely on the JavaBean event model: http://java.sun.com/products/javabeans/ Basically, a JavaBean event is made of 3 classes: - an event class, which holds the state variables of the event - a listener interface (an abstract class if we speak C++) which defines methods that will be called upon notification of the event - a source object, which registers and unregisters listeners and fires calls to the listener's method when the event is trigged The translation of MVC in term of JavaBeans is that a Model is an event source and the View and/or the Controler are listeners (more precisely, they use 'adapters' to translate the calls to the listener's method into calls of their own methods). For instance, if you want to program in MVC a slider that follows an int value, you will need 3 classes: - an event class: class IntEvent { ... } - a listener interface: interface IntListener { void valueChanged( IntEvent ev); } - a source class (which is in fact in Swing an interface): interface IntModel { void addIntListener( IntListener listener) {...} void removeIntListener( IntListener listener) {...} int getValue() {...} } and the graphical widget will be: class Slider { Slider( IntModel model) {...} } And the gain is that your widget knows nothing about the way you store your data, if the value change is trigged by a message received other a socket or a inter-thread fifo etc... Translating this model to C++ is possible, using abstract classes for interfaces and multiple inheritance for interface implementation. However, something I'd be very happy to hear about is a translation in Python of the MVC architecture. I think also that one of the computer science bibles can be worth reading: 'Desing Patterns' by E. Gamma, R. Helm & J. Vlissides. BTW, not to promote my own kitchen, but jMax code uses a lot MVC :-) François