Future Beans

February 1998 / Features / Making Components Portable with JavaBeans / Future Beans

The JavaBeans 1.0 specification has been around for a while, but it's still incomplete. Subsequent versions have been in the pipeline for some time. The Glasgow specification, for example, was made avail able for public review last September. Some of the specification's important features are as follows:

A containment-and-services protocol that enables a Bean to discover information about the Bean within which it's contained and for the containing Bean to make services available to the Beans it c ontains.
A drag-and-drop subsystem that closely integrates drag-and-drop operations with the native platform facilities. This is to permit Java and the native-platform applications that are running side-by-side on the same system to cooperate.
An activation framework that enables applications to determine the type of and identify an arbitrary piece of data, encapsulate access to it, discover the operations that are available on it, and instantiate the appropriate JavaBeans component to perform these operations.
Issues such as aggregation were dropped from the Glasgow specification, so we can be sure that there will be more revisions and releases beyond the current one.

Matthew Wilson
My approach to software engineering is far more pragmatic than it is theoretical--and no language better exemplifies this than C++.

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