Core Java™ 2 Volume II - Advanced Features, Seventh Edition

Using Beans to Build an Application

Before we get into the mechanics of writing beans, we want you to see how you might use or test them. ImageViewerBean is a perfectly usable bean, but outside a builder environment it can't show off its special features. In particular, the only way to use it in an ordinary program in the Java programming language would be to write code that constructs an object of the bean class, places the object into a container, and calls the setFileName method. That's not rocket science, but it is more code than an overworked programmer may want to write. Builder environments aim to reduce the amount of drudgery that is involved in wiring together components into an application.

Each builder environment uses its own set ...