 - JavaBeans is an object-oriented programming interface from Sun Microsystems that lets you build re-useable applications or program building blocks called components that can be deployed in a network on any major operating system platform. Like Java applets, JavaBeans components (or "Beans") can be used to give World Wide Web pages (or other applications) interactive capabilities such as computing interest rates or varying page content based on user or browser characteristics.
From a user's point-of-view, a component can be a button that you interact with or a small calculating program that gets initiated when you press the button. From a developer's point-of-view, the button component and the calculator component are created separately and can then be used together or in different combinations with other components in different applications or situations.
When the components or Beans are in use, the properties of a Bean (for example, the background color of a window) are visible to other Beans and Beans that haven't "met" before can learn each other's properties dynamically and interact accordingly.
Beans are developed with a Beans Development Kit (BDK) from Sun and can be run on any major operating system platform inside a number of application environments (known as containers), including browsers, word processors, and other applications.
To build a component with JavaBeans, you write language statements using Sun's Java programming language and include JavaBeans statements that describe component properties such as user interface characteristics and events that trigger a bean to communicate with other beans in the same container or elsewhere in the network.
Beans also have persistence, which is a mechanism for storing the state of a component in a safe place. This would allow, for example, a component (bean) to "remember" data that a particular user had already entered in an earlier user session.
JavaBeans gives Java applications the compound document capability that the OpenDoc and ActiveX interfaces already provide.
Also see Enterprise JavaBeans.
| CONTRIBUTORS: |
Susan Adams and Orjan Timan |
| LAST UPDATED: |
01 Apr 2004
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