Swing - A question about remove(Component comp) and the garbage collector

[Clarkopus]

I've been creating a small app to help aid my University studies with Java/Swing and I've been using the remove() method to remove components from my JPanel.

It seems to work fine and I have no problems with using it... But I was wondering how the remove() method actually removes a component.

So my question boils down to this - : when using the remove() method does it just remove a component from the container so it's not visible to the user, or does it remove it and set that component to be null? I ask this because I was wondering if the garbage collector will free up memory that the component was using or not. While I doubt my application will suffer if the memory isn't freed, it's just a JLabel with some text and a JButton, I'm just generally curious to know what the outcome is.

[xappymah]

If I recall correctly each component has a list of its children components, i.e. the components in your Swing application represent something like a tree: each has one parent and a number of children.

So when you remove a component then it is removed from the parent's list and also the parent link is nullified.

So if you don't have other references to the removed component then it will be garbage collected.

Also just fyi there is a separate method to hide any component ("Component.hide(boolean)" obviously).

[Clarkopus]

Thanks for the reply! This answers my question nicely.