The JavaBeans Power Guide CD

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The JavaBeans Power Guide CD contains a collection of beans, builder tools and runtimes. This isn't just another collection of applets and publisher's editions. Instead it's full of beans you can use.

The CD is a cross-platform CD that should be mountable on the Mac, Solaris, Windows 95, and Windows NT 4.0. You can mount the CD using whatever method you normally use on your platform, probably filemanager in Solaris, and just sticking it in the drive on Mac and Windows.

There's no fancy installer. You can browse the directories as you would a hard drive. Most archives are provided in some compressed format. If you see anything you like copy it to your hard drive and decompress it there using a tool like unzip or StuffIt Expander.

The contents of the CD are divided into four directories:

The src directory does contain an index.html file you can load into your web browser of choice to provide a simple HTML interface for the samples from this book.

Beans

Stingray Software's Objective Blend collection of user interface beans implement several commonly used graphical user interface (GUI) components such as trees, tabbed windows, spinners, progress bars, meter bars, sliders, text controls, combo boxes, list boxes, buttons, and more. The evaluation version included on the CD displays an evaluation dialog which makes it clear you hold an evaluation license. The full version with full source code and no runtime royalties costs $295. For more information about Objective Blend see http://www.stingsoft.com/new/cjava.htm

Paul Moeller's LandscapeBean was one of the first freeware beans released. It draws random fractal landscape whenever its randomLandscape() method is invoked. The fractal engine was adapted from an applet by Chris Thornborrow at SGI. Documentation is included in the JAR archive. You can get the latest version of the LandscapeBean from http://www.oneimage.com/~moeller/paul/beans/BeanPage.html

Rogue Wave Software's JWidgets 3.0 bean collection includes a tree control, a cell grid, a tabbed panel, an image button, an image component, a slider, and more. An evaluation version is included on the CD. You can order the full version for $395 direct from Rogue Wave's web site at http://www.roguewave.com/.

Prospero Software Products' PSPNum bean subclasses java.awt.TextField component. You use the PSPNum bean for decimal numbers with an edit mask that controls the display of numeric values in the edit box. For example,123.45 or US$123.45. Masking also allows you to deal with international variations in numeric input/display. Several demos of this bean are also included. The full version of PSPNum costs $200.00 for the first license, $10.00 for each additional license. There are no runtime fees. You can find out more at http://www.prosperosoftware.co.uk/pspnum/numframe2.htm

Builders

Sun's Beans Development Kit (BDK) is used throughout the book. It is included on the CD for Windows and Unix. No Macintosh version of the BDK was available at the time I wing the book though it's likely to be by the time the book reaches store shelves. Regrettably there's no Mac utility which can expand a Unix shell archive or a Windows self-extracting archive. Mac users can upload the shell archive to the nearest Unix box, perhaps at an ISP, expand it there, and download the files. Or you can copy the Windows file to a PC, expand that, then copy the files back.

Tek-Tools' Kawa is an simple yet powerful Java Integrated Development Environment for Windows 95, NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 that supports JavaBeans. A 45-day evaluation copy of Kawa 2.1.1 is included on the CD as a self-extracting .exe file. You can learn more about Kawa at http://www.tek-tools.com/. You can purchase the full version for $49 from Tek-Tools' website or call 1-888-866-KAWA or send email to contact@tek-tools.com.

Runtimes

The runtimes folder includes Sun's Java Development Kit 1.1.4 for Solaris and Windows. At the time this book went to press, there was no Macintosh runtime that supported JavaBeans. Even the pre-release Macintosh Runtime for Java 2.0 which supported Java 1.1 had bugs that prevented it from running the BeanBox (though it was stable enough to test some of the beans in this book in stand-alone mode). However, by the time this book reaches store shelves Apple is expected to have released a version of Macintosh Runtime for Java 2.0 that does support beans and the BeanBox. You can retrieve it from http://applejava.apple.com/.

Source

The final thing you'll find on the CD is the complete source code for all the example programs in this book. This is included in the src directory in uncompressed format, divided by chapter. As with all Java source code files, these are named based on their contents. Thus you'll see StringBean.java instead of STRINGBE~.JAV. You should be able to copy these onto your hard drive, compile them, and run them. There are a couple of cases, most notably in Chapter 10, where one example was a modification of a previous class which did not change the previous class's name. In these cases, the later class has the correct name and the earlier class has a slightly modified name and will have to be renamed before you can compile it.

Please feel free to reuse any or all of this source code in your own projects. No specific permission is necessary or required.


[ Cafe au Lait | JavaBeans Power Guide Home | Table of Contents | Foreword by Bruce Eckel | Examples | About the CD | Order ]

Copyright 1997 Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Last Modified December 12, 1999