As you start working with widgets, you will quickly realize that they are stateless. Every call back to paint the widget is invoked and the process dismantled (unless you take reasonable steps to keep this process alive, if that were to be needed). There is no explicit or direct mechanism to ask the widget: "Hey, what did I paint you with the last time around?". This is essentially a valid question if the widget were to have a state. Such a state is typically (indirectly) maintained using a persistence mechansim such as files, shared preferences, SQLLite, or the internet itself.

This item has some example **drafty** source code to illustrate this.