Visual beans

The toolkit provides a set of beans that facilitate the development of the operation views. These beans are subclasses of Swing beans (Version 1.1.1). The behavior they add has two main objectives:

The toolkit visual beans are located in the com.ibm.dse.gui package, but delivered as a plug-in so that they can be available from the Visual Editor for Java palette in WebSphere Studio. See Installing the plug-in for instructions on how to show the visual beans in the palette. Views that are developed using these beans can be managed by the Desktop or by any other view manager you create.

A BeanInfo class implements java.beans.BeanInfo and is used by the Visual Editor to determine the behavior of the properties view for the bean, and also whether a customizer is available. These beans have a group of properties (property descriptors) that are set by the developer at development time. The Visual Editor for Java uses the property descriptors described in the BeanInfo class to work out the list of entries in the Properties view as well as how they should be edited.

The toolkit provides the following types of visual beans: