Basic Bean Concepts
Individual Java Beans will vary in functionality, but
most share certain common defining features.
- Support for introspection
allowing a builder tool to analyze how a bean
works.
- Support for customization allowing a user
to alter the appearance and behavior of a bean.
- Support for events allowing beans to
fire events, and informing builder tools about both the
events they can fire and the events they can handle.
- Support for properties allowing beans to
be manipulated programatically, as well as to support the
customization mentioned above.
- Support for persistence allowing beans that
have been customized in an application builder to have their
state saved and restored. Typically persistence is used
with an application builder's save and load menu commands to
restore any work that has gone into constructing an application.
While Beans are intended to be used primarily with builder
tools, they need not be. Beans can be manually manipulated
by text tools through programatic interfaces. All key APIs,
including support for events, properties, and persistence,
have been designed to be easily read and understood by
human programmers as well as by builder tools.
