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Visual Java


By Allen Holub
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July 15, 2005 —  (Page 1 of 2)
I recently stumbled across JSR 273, “Design-Time API for JavaBeans,” on the jcp.org site. This is a new Java Specification Request that was originally contemplated for Mustang (J2SE 6), but which will probably be released after Mustang ships next year. The point of this JSR is to extend the JavaBeans 1.01 spec to make it easier to integrate a JavaBean-compliant component that you write into a design-time container. (I’m talking primarily about visual components that appear in a user interface and are manipulated by a design-time Visual Basic-like layout tool; these sorts of beans have nothing to do with EJBs, for example.)

The main reason I find this JSR interesting is that the original JavaBeans specification was responsible for introducing the getter/setter idiom to Java, an idiom that’s fundamentally at odds with the object-oriented principle of implementation hiding. The result is that there are a lot of procedural programs written in Java by people who think that they’re programming in an object-oriented way. Overuse of getter/setter functions causes serious maintenance problems, and can obviate most of the advantages of OO systems.

Interestingly, the original JavaBeans spec didn’t mandate that you use a getter/setter idiom. The point of the idiom was to tag certain attributes of an object for inclusion in a tool-generated property sheet. That is, if you provided getFoo() and setFoo() methods, then a design-time tool would include a Foo property in the property sheet for that component. The spec provides for a much more object-oriented way of doing the same thing: A BeanCustomizer could create an arbitrary property sheet for a component, thereby rendering the getter/setter functions unnecessary.

The problem was that nobody understood how to build a customizer. The specification itself was responsible for this problem. The section on customizers was both sketchy and much harder to understand than the rest of the document. More to the point, the spec included no discussion of why you might want to use a customizer. The net result is that nobody did use them, and as a consequence a lot of bad code has been written.




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