Installation Instructions for BeanView

Requirements

Obtaining

Using BeanView

Requirements

Java 5.0 (as of this writing, I am using the following JDK)

java version "1.5.0_06"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_06-b05)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_06-b05, mixed mode, sharing)

Eclipse 3.1.1 or NetBeans 4.1 or greater

This is technically not required, but highly recommended. I periodically switch between NetBeans and Eclipse. I mainly use Eclipse for the actual development of BeanView, and NetBeans as my primary visual editor for Swing.

Tomcat 5.5

As of this writing, I am using 5.5.15-beta. This is only required for use with Echo 2.0. - if you are only interested in Swing applications and will not be building BeanView, you don't need Tomcat.

I strongly recommend turning OFF the Tomcat autoexpansion of WAR files when working with Echo 2.0. You can find this setting in the TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml file. Set the unpackWARs property to false as shown:

<Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps"
       unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="true"
       xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">

In addition, Echo 2 2.1.0.beta5 or later is required, but this distribution is included with BeanView 1.0.1.

Obtaining BeanView

BeanView can be downloaded from BeanView.com.

Using BeanView

BeanView is intended to be very simple for a developer to use. From a high level, the usage is as follows:
  1. Create a JavaBean-style object
  2. Add the appropriate annotations to the object.
  3. Add the appropriate BeanView panel to your container. As of this writing, there are two panels available that implement the com.beanview.BeanView interface: com.beanview.swing.SwingBeanViewPanel, com.beanview.echo.EchoBeanViewPanel.
  4. Pass an instance of your JavaBean to the BeanView via the BeanView.setDataObject() method.
  5. If you wish to update the JavaBean instance from the current view, call BeanView.updateObjectFromPanel(). Note that if there are errors (for example, a user entered a letter in a numbers-only field), you may want to check BeanView.hasErrors() before committing the changes.
  6. If you wish to update the panel from the JavaBean, call BeanView.updatePanelFromObject().

That's it. There are some screenshots if you are interested in seeing how this looks.

There are also javadocs if you are interested in more information.

Return to http://www.beanview.com/

@author $Author: wiverson $
@version $Revision: 1.2 $, $Date: 2006/08/12 01:31:14 $