Klaas,
Actions and dependencies are a core issues that developers run into. There isn't a perfect/easy answer to this. It really depends on your app. You seem to be going down the right road with an action factory. I would extend that concept further by having an action registry with one instance of each action. The various buttons you have should all be able to share once instance of an action in the majority of your cases. Getting back to dependencies ... as you mentioned you can use private inner classes. However, this will cause things to get messy quite quickly. I'll admit the other option of passing in a callback interface can get overwhelming as well. At this point your are getting into a core dependencies issue not just a UI issue. There are a number of ways to help reduce this dependency burden. I would recommend looking at Martin Fowler's dependency injection article for ideas:
http://www.martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html Dependency injection might be overkill for your project. However, a service locator might help separate out your dependencies better. Another option is to make your application more message based. You can use a JMS implementation like
Somnifugi or
Werx2 to make a message bus. Then your components can send an event throught the bus which the actions can respond to. The actions can then perform some work and respond on the bus. The components can listen to this message and act accordingly. So you can have the two working together without tight coupling. Finally you should take a look at the following Java.net actions project.
https://gui-commands.dev.java.net/ I hope all this gives you some ideas.
Scott Delap
ClientJava.com Desktop Java Live
