Learning Java, 4th Edition

The NetBeans IDE

We can’t have a full discussion of beans without spending a little time talking about the builder environments in which they are used. In this chapter, we use the NetBeans IDE version 7.2 to demonstrate our beans. NetBeans is a popular, pure Java development environment. In this case, the integrated in integrated development environment means that NetBeans offers powerful source and visual editor capabilities, templates that aid in the creation of various types of Java classes, and the ability to compile, run, and debug applications, all in one tool. In particular, we’ll be using the visual development environment of NetBeans to glue together our Java beans and try them out. Other IDEs offer similar capabilities. See Appendix A for a brief comparison of NetBeans and the Eclipse IDE. We’ve chosen NetBeans to use in this chapter because its mature GUI builder environment makes it easy to illustrate the concepts here.

Because NetBeans is a full-blown production development environment, it has many features we don’t use in these examples. For that reason, we can’t really provide a full introduction to it here. We will provide only bare-bones directions here for demonstrating the Java beans in this chapter. Most of the techniques you see here will apply in some form in other IDEs as well.

Installing and Running NetBeans

You should install Java 7.0 before you install NetBeans. If you installed the JDK from Sun’s website, you may have downloaded a combined JDK and NetBeans ...