JavaBeans^TM under JDK 1.0.2

However it is possible to begin initial development of Java Bean components under JDK 1.0.2, using a subset of the beans architecture that is compatible with JDK 1.0.2.

To enable this, JavaSoft has defined a set of rules for "transitional" Beans, which are fully compliant with the 1.0 Java Beans architecture, but which can be used to build applets and applications that can run on JDK 1.0.2 and on JDK 1.0.2 enabled systems such as Netscape Navigator 3.0 and Internet Explorer 3.0. We also provide three transitional classes to aid migration to JDK 1.1. See Appendix A of the Java Beans spec for more details on transitional beans.

These transitional beans will necessarily only use a subset of the full bean model. However this subset includes the basic property/method/event mechanisms, so that a transitional bean is still very useful within a JDK 1.0.2 environment.

Principal requirements for JDK 1.0.2 beans:

• The bean should use the getFoo/setFoo patterns for properties, as defined in the beans spec.

• All of the bean's persistent state should be accessible via getFoo/setFoo properties. This allows external tools to save and restore the beans state using the property accessor methods.

• Any events the bean fires should use the new AWT event model and should use the sunw.util.EventObject and sunw.util.EventListener interfaces to mark events and event listeners. However in interacting with AWT, the bean must of necessity use the old AWT event model to catch AWT events.

• If the bean is prepared in the future to use automatic serialization then it must inherit from the sunw.io.Serializable marker interface.

For intrepid early developers, here are the three transitional classes and the sources for the event examples as a ZIP file and a compressed tar file.