Tic Tac Toe personal project

This is a Tic Tac Toe game in Java in preparation for my seconds personal project (chess game). I'm having a little problem though and am thinking that my for loop to create those buttons is a mistake. I believe I should instantiate all 9 JButtons implicitly instead of using a for loop because then I know for sure I will be able to compare each and every button. What are your thoughts?

import javax.swing.*;
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.event.ActionEvent;
import java.awt.event.ActionListener;

/**
 * Created by Usman on 5/17/2016.
 */
public class TicTacToeGUI extends JPanel {

    boolean turn = true;

    public TicTacToeGUI() {
        setLayout(new GridLayout(3,3));

        for(int i=0 ; i<9 ; i++) {
            JButton btn = new JButton("");
            btn.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(70,60));
            btn.setFont(new Font("Arial", Font.PLAIN, 40));
            btn.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
                @Override
                public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
                    if(btn.isEnabled()){
                        if(turn){
                            btn.setText("X");
                            turn = !turn;
                        }
                        else{
                            btn.setText("O");
                            turn = true;
                        }
                        btn.setEnabled(false);
                    }
                }
            });
            add(btn);
        }
    }

    public static void main(String []args){
        TicTacToeGUI game = new TicTacToeGUI();
        JFrame frame = new JFrame("Tic Tac Toe");
        frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        frame.getContentPane().add(game);
        frame.pack();
        frame.setVisible(true);
    }
}

Using a loop isn't inherently wrong, the problem you're anticipating though is right -- you won't have a way of comparing and referencing the buttons since they all become anonymous with your current approach.

Instead, use an array of JButton and simply use the iterator of the loop to instantiate at that location which you can later utilize as an index to reference a specific JButton.

JButton[0] board = new JButton[9];
    for (int i = 0; i < board.length; i++) {
        board[i] = new JButton("");
    }

On the topic of anonymity, as of Java 8 rather than using anonymous inner classes for Action Events you can use Lambda Expressions.

So, you can replace this chunk of code:

btn.addActionListener(new ActionListener() {
                @Override
                public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {

With:

btn.addActionListener(e -> {

Of course, you close the bracket. This also has the benefit of no longer requiring you to import ActionEvent and ActionListener directly.

StackExchange Code Review Q#128688, answer score: 2