15.1 Bean Basics

We begin our discussion of beans with some basic concepts and terminology. Any object that conforms to certain basic rules and naming conventions can be a bean; there is no Bean class that all beans are required to subclass. Many beans are Swing or AWT components, but it is also quite possible, and often useful, to write "invisible" beans that don't have an onscreen appearance. ( Just because a bean doesn't have an onscreen appearance in a finished application doesn't mean that it can't be visually manipulated by a beanbox tool, however.)

A bean exports properties, events, and methods. A property is a piece of the bean's internal state that can be programmatically set and queried, usually through a standard pair of get and set accessor methods. A bean may generate events in the same way that a GUI component, such as a JButton, generates ActionEvent events. The JavaBeans API uses the same event model (in fact, it defines the event model) used by Swing and AWT GUIs in Java 1.1 and later. See Chapter 11 for a full discussion of this model. A bean defines an event by providing methods for adding and removing event listener objects from a list of interested listeners for that event. Finally, the methods exported by a bean are simply any public methods defined by the bean, excluding those methods used to get and set property values and register and remove event listeners.

In addition to the regular sort of properties just described, the JavaBeans API also provides support for indexed properties, bound properties, and constrained properties. An indexed property is any property that has an array value and for which the bean provides methods to get and set individual elements of the array, as well as methods to get and set the entire array. A bound property is one that sends out a notification event when its value changes, while a constrained property is one that sends out a notification event when its value changes and allows the change to be vetoed by listeners.

Because Java allows dynamic loading of classes, beanbox programs can load arbitrary beans. The beanbox tool determines the properties, events, and methods a bean supports with an introspection mechanism that is based on the java.lang.reflect reflection mechanism for obtaining information about the members of a class. A bean can also provide an auxiliary BeanInfo class that supplies additional information about the bean. The BeanInfo class provides this additional information in the form of a number of FeatureDescriptor objects, each of which describes a single feature of the bean. FeatureDescriptor has a number of subclasses: BeanDescriptor, PropertyDescriptor, IndexedPropertyDescriptor, EventSetDescriptor, MethodDescriptor, and ParameterDescriptor.

A primary task of a beanbox application is to allow the user to customize a bean by setting property values. A beanbox defines property editors for commonly used property types, such as numbers, strings, fonts, and colors. If a bean has a property of a more complicated type, however, it may need to define a PropertyEditor class that enables the beanbox to let the user set values for that property.

In addition, a complex bean may not be satisfied with the property-by-property customization mechanism provided by most beanboxes. Such a bean may want to define a Customizer class, which creates a graphical interface that allows the user to configure a bean in some useful way. A particularly complex bean may even define customizers that serve as "wizards" that guide the user step-by-step through the customization process.