MVC in Java

Hay guise. There are a bunch of sites out there that praise the MVC pattern up and down, but I can't seem to find anything but extremely trivial examples of it being put to use.

The deal is, I'm working on a Java project for school (it's a calendar.. how fun) and we're supposed to be utilizing MVC. To maintain a strict separation of view and controller, which is the usual problem spot for overlapping functionality, we simply moved all of the action and mouse listeners for the various windows and components into one huge controller class. To determine where events are coming from we either A) set action commands if it's an actionlistener, or B) name each component and have a bunch of if/else statements to see how we should handle the event.

This worked out ok in the beginning, but now it's just a huge clusterfuck. Everything would be so much easier if we could just use the traditional addActionListener(this) + implementing actionListenerfor each class or the good old addActionListener(new ActionListener(){... method, especially because a lot of the actual events don't even touch the backend, they just deal with modifying the view.

I guess the question I have is, how do you actually implement an MVC pattern in a real program? Should only the actions that will directly interface with the backend of the program be handled by the controller? There has to be a better way >:O

>>4
Design patterns exist to cover the logical deficiencies in current programming languages.

For example, the singleton is a pattern that is very helpful in multithreaded applications, particularly ones where you can't be sure or simply don't want to care which thread accesses the singleton first.

The design patterns themselves are not harmful, it is the programmers that use them indiscriminately and parrot that they are good without knowing why. Try "programmers considered harmful" next time.