I remember learning the value of the same principle [Field and Status line help messages] back in my early days developing commercial applications using compiled "Pascal" on "DEC VMS" O/S using some proprietary Forms Builder (FMS?) and proprietary database (Datatrieve?) for users viewing applications via "vt100 text character" green-screens. Weird/nostalgic re: 1980's.
The idea of field help & status bar help has been around for a while.
One question, does this method have any inherent support to de-couple the messages from the code [rather than the text being embedded into Java statements ] ?
This way messages can be written and maintained in separate files by separate people, with stronger linguistic / multi-lingual abilities than the developer. Division of labour etc.
