I have a question regarding the use of the MVC framework for a blackjack game im writing in java. As I understand, my model would be a class that stores the state of the game, and more specifically, each players hand. Within the model class, I would have an array of listeners, which would be notified each time the game state changes (ie a player has drawn a new card).

These listeners would be my viewer, which is the class that handles the display of the game. This class would implement the ActionListener interface, and each time the model changes, it would call/"notify" my viewer's actionPerformed method.

My question is as follows: I intend to have two JPanels, each devoted to displaying the respective player's hand. As a player draws a new card, a new ImageIcon would be added to the panel. My question is how would the viewer class know what card has been added to the player's hand?

I suppose I could store the player's hand before a notify event, and then upon the notification event, compare the new state with the old, to find out what has changed. I'm a complete novice here, so I could be completely wrong, but it seems a bit tedious to do this.

Is there a more efficient/common way of detecting what has changed in the model between the before and after state? Another solution would be to redraw the entire panel each time the notification occurs? Would this be a better idea?