Developing Java Beans

Chapter 7. The BeanBox Tool

The BeanBox tool is a sample Bean container that comes with the Beans Development Kit (BDK). It allows you to test the functionality of your Beans, including properties, events, and serialization. BeanBox is not an application development tool, nor does it try to be one. It is designed to be a simple testing tool, and it serves this purpose well enough.

You should keep in mind that the user interface and features of BeanBox are not intended to be a guideline for application tools to follow. Commercial development tools that work with Beans are free to use any preferred mechanisms for assembling components into applications. In fact, those mechanisms are what help differentiate one tool from another.

This chapter doesn’t try to cover every aspect of BeanBox. We’ll just look at some of the features that will be helpful in testing your work. BeanBox allows you to select Beans from a palette and drop them onto a form. It provides a property sheet for setting the values of a Bean’s properties, and it allows you to connect event sources and event targets by visually associating them. BeanBox also lets you save the entire state of your form by serializing all of the Beans; you can subsequently reload the form and its constituent Beans.

Running BeanBox

The beanbox directory in your BDK installation contains two command scripts for running BeanBox. The first one, run.bat, is for running BeanBox on Windows NT and Windows 95. The other, run.sh, is for running it on ...