18.3.1 Bean Instantiation and Type Management

Beans are an abstraction over simple Java classes. They add, by convention, features that are not part of the Java language. Over the course of the next year, the JavaBeans specification will evolve to give Beans even greater capabilities. The goal is to allow groups of Beans to work together as an aggregate or a sort of "virtual Bean."

To enable us to treat a collection of Beans as a single type within the Java language, we have to use some special tools. Specifically, when working with Beans, we need replacements for three basic Java operations: creating an object with new, checking the type of an object with the instanceof operator, and casting a type with a cast expression. In place of these, use the corresponding static methods of the java.beans.Beans class, shown in Table 18.1.

Beans.instantiate() is the new operation for Beans. It takes a classloader and the name of a Bean class or serialized Bean as arguments. Its advantage over the new operator is that it can also load Beans from a serialized class. If you use intantiate(), you don't have to specify in advance whether you will provide the Bean as a class or as a serialized object.

Beans.isInstanceOf() and Beans.getInstanceOf() do the jobs of checking a Bean's type and casting it to a new type. In the future these methods will be used to let Beans take control of this behavior, providing different "views" of themselves.

18.3.2 Working with Serialized Beans

Remember the tip calculator we developed a few sections back? I asked you to serialize the BeanBox container and save it. As I mentioned earlier, BeanBox is a Bean itself. We can therefore pull the serialized BeanBox along with all of our previous work into another application and use it just as we had left it. We'll assume that you saved the serialized BeanBox in a file called tipcalc.ser.

Compile the following small application:

import java.awt.*;
import java.beans.*;

public class MyApplication extends Frame {

    public MyApplication() {
        super("Tip Calculator");
        try {
            Object bean = Beans.instantiate( 
                getClass().getClassLoader(), "tipcalc" );

            if ( Beans.isInstanceOf(bean, Component.class) ) {
                Component comp = 
                    (Component)Beans.getInstanceOf(bean, Component.class);
                add("Center", comp);
            } else
                System.out.println("Bean is not a Component...");

        } catch ( java.io.IOException e1 ) {
			// Error loading the serialized object
        } catch ( ClassNotFoundException e2 ) {
			// Can't find the class that goes with the object
        }
        pack();
    }

    public static void main(String [] args) {
        new MyApplication().show();
    }
}

Run this program, making sure that the BeanBox classes and our magicbeans.jar file are in your class path. You should see the restored BeanBox, just as you left it, as shown in Figure 18.10.

Figure 18.10: The restored BeanBox

Here we use Beans.instantiate() to load our serialized Bean by name. Then we check to see if it is a GUI component using Beans.isInstanceOf(). (It is because the BeanBox itself is a subclass of java.awt.Panel.) Finally, we cast the instantiated object to a Component with Beans.getInstanceOf() and add it to our application's Frame. Notice that we still need a static Java cast to turn the Object returned by getInstanceOf() into a Component. This cast may seem gratuitous; in the future, an aggregate Bean consisting of several simple Beans could use this feature to present an object with the desired behavior.

One important question remains: how does instantiate() find a Bean using the name "tipcalc"? First, it appends the extension .ser to form the filename tipcalc.ser. If it can find this file anywhere along the class path, it loads it as a serialized Bean. It also needs the serialized Bean's original .class file; the name of that file is included in the serialized object and usually doesn't have any relation to the name of the serialized object. (In this case, instantiate() would look for BeanBox.class and the classes for the components in the BeanBox.)

If the .ser file doesn't exist, instantiate() appends .class to the name (in this case, yielding tipcalc.class) and looks for a class file. In this case, instantiate() instantiates the Bean like any other object--that is, with the new operator.