I am pretty sure this is not doable, but I will go ahead and cross my fingers and ask.

I am trying to add a method to a built in class. I want this method to be callable by all of the built in class's subclasses. Specifically:

I have a JButton, a JTextPane, and other JComponents. I want to be able to pass in a JDom Element instead of a Rectangle to setBounds(). My current solution is to extend each JComponent subclass with the desired methods, but that is a LOT of duplicate code. Is there a way I can write the following method just one time, and have it callable on all JComponent objects? Or is it required that I extend each subclass individually, and copy and paste the method below?

public void setBounds(Element element) {
    this.setBounds(Integer.parseInt(element.getAttribute(
            "x").toString()), Integer.parseInt(element
            .getAttribute("y").toString()), Integer
            .parseInt(element.getAttribute("width").toString()),
            Integer.parseInt(element.getAttribute("height")
                    .toString()));
}