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This question is not about a specific program. This is about design - the UML phase of the project.

I am supervising a Java project. It will contain a lot of modal popup dialogs. From a C/C++ standpoint, I have a reference to the main window maintained throughout the program so every dialog may, as necessary, block interactivity with the main dialog. In Java, is there a standard way to do this?

This is a scenario: The main executable owns a JFrame that is the main window. The main executable has an object, I will call it a House. The House has some Room objects. The Room object has a Closet object.

If I want the Closet object to pop up a dialog, blocking input to the main window, do I have to send an instance of the main JFrame to the House, pass it along to each Room, then passing it along to each Closet? Is there a way to say "Give me the top level component"? Or... Is this simply not the way that it is done properly in Java?

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Sure, if a data sink in your application's world really is unique, i.e. all messages of some kind originating anywhere in your system should end up there, then there's nothing wrong with having a dedicated instance servicing them all (although it might become a bottleneck with respect to performance or even deadlock).

It's just not customary to hold such a reference in a global variable. Much more often you see a singleton with a getInstance() method, a named entity that every component can look up via some sort of service registry, something invisibly weaved into the program by AOP, or similar mechanisms.

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I will suggest that they use a singleton as there will only be one instance of the main class. –  kainaw Sep 23 '14 at 13:45

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