The JavaBeans API

JavaBeans technology is a component architecture for the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE). JavaBean components are known as beans. Beans are reusable software programs that you can develop and assemble easily to create sophisticated applications. JavaBeans technology is based on the JavaBeans specification.

The JavaBeans API and its implementation are contained in the java.beans package. A few of the classes are used by beans while they run in an application. For example the event classes are used by beans that fire property and vetoable change events (see PropertyChangeEvent). However, most of the classes in this package are meant to be used by a bean editor that is, a development environment for customizing and putting together beans to create an application. In particular, these classes help the bean editor create a user interface that the user can use to customize the bean. For example, a bean may contain a property of a special type that a bean editor may not know how to handle. By using the PropertyEditor interface, a bean developer can provide an editor for this special type.

The java.beans package provides support for long-term persistence - reading and writing a bean as a textual representation of its property values. The property values are treated as beans, and are recursively read or written to capture their publicly available state. This approach is suitable for long-term storage because it relies only on public API, rather than the likely-to-change private implementation. You read and write beans in XML format using the XMLDecoder and XMLEncoder classes, respectively. One notable feature of the persistence scheme is that reading in a bean requires no special knowledge of the bean.

To minimize the resources used by a bean, the classes used by bean editors are loaded only when the bean is being edited. They are not needed while the bean is running in an application and therefore not loaded. This information is kept in what's called a bean-info (see BeanInfo). These classes is not contained in core (real-time) library (rt.jar). You should use additional (design-time) library (dt.jar). This library contains bean-info classes for Swing.

Package java.beans.beancontext provides classes and interfaces relating to bean context. A bean context is a container for beans and defines the execution environment for the beans it contains. There can be several beans in a single bean context, and a bean context can be nested within another bean context. This package also contains events and listener interface for beans being added and removed from a bean context.

Future plans

JSR 273: Design-Time API for JavaBeans <http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=273>

This JSR extends the JavaBeans specification and APIs to improve design-time functionality for component authors to leverage within the visual design environments in IDEs.

JSR 295: Beans Binding <http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=295>

This JSR provides an API that allows two properties of two beans to stay in sync.

Source Code & Building

The source code of the JavaBeans API and its implementation resides in the "src/share/classes" directory of the workspace. Java classes are located corresponding to the package hierarchy (eg java.beans.BeanInfo) are in "src/share/classes/java/beans/BeanInfo.java".

Non-public classes reside in:

The makefile structure is as follows:

Resources