Recursion causes exit to exit all JFrames (terminates app)

Question

I have made an application that gives the user the option to open up a new spawn of the application entirely. When the user does so and closes the application the entire application terminates; not just the window.

How should I go about recursively spawning an application and then when the user exits the JFrame spawn; killing just that JFrame and not the entire instance?

Here is the relevant code:

[...]
JMenuItem newMenuItem = new JMenuItem ("New");
newMenuItem.addActionListener(new ActionListener()
{
    public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e)
{        
    new MainWindow();
    }
});
fileMenu.add(newMenuItem);

[....]

JMenuItem exit = new JMenuItem("Exit");
exit.addActionListener(new ActionListener()
{
    public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e)
    {
        frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
    }
});
fileMenu.add(exit);
[...]

Answer 1

I completely removed the frame.setDefaultCloserOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE); code.

I changed it to DISPOSE_ON_CLOSE and still the problem was still happening. I ended up creating a windowEvent and adding: frame.dispose(); and the behavior is what I wanted.

Here is the code:

                frame.addWindowListener(new WindowListener() {
                public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e) {
                    //Allows for multiple instances and properly closing
                    //only one of the Frames instead of all of them
                    frame.dispose();
                }
                public void windowOpened(WindowEvent e) {}              
                public void windowClosed(WindowEvent e) {}
                public void windowIconified(WindowEvent e) {}
                public void windowDeiconified(WindowEvent e) {}
                public void windowActivated(WindowEvent e) {}
                public void windowDeactivated(WindowEvent e) {}
            });