The JBeans project / News: Recent posts

The 1.2 release is available for download. It contains only a few performance enhancements and a rework of part of the automatic conversion support in the package. Before, null values were not being auto-converted. Someone was nice enough to submit a bug about this telling me that nulls can and should be converted. Mostly this happens for primitive values, but could be useful elsewhere as well.

So, I've change the package to support conversion of nulls. I also went back and beefed up the converters for booleans, characters, and numbers so that they handle the cases where the value is null or empty and the target convert type is a primitive. In this case, the initial value for that primitive is returned (booleans - false, character - '\u0000', numbers - some form of 0) in one of the primitive wrapper classes.... read more

I registered jbeans.org and transferred all the website files over there. This is now the new home page for the JBeans project. Hope everyone enjoys it.

The 1.1 release is available for download. It contains some minor changes and two new classes. The changes include making the two event classes extend java.util.EventObject and the two listener interfaces extend java.util.EventListener. The JavaBean class also contains new methods that help retrieve nested properties, check if properties are indexed and a few others.

The new class is a new dynamic nested bean property class. A problem with the old nested bean property class was that once constructed it was impossible to change the indices used for indexed properties in the nesting. The new class does not take indices during construction, rather it takes either an array or indices or List of indices during retrieval or update. This provides a much more flexible method of accessing nested bean properties.

Well, after the 1.0 release, I've been working on some various bugs and enhancements. I'm getting ready to do a 1.1 release either tomorrow or sometime next week.

This release will mostly since obscure problems like PropertyEvent next extending java.util.EventObject. I've also added a few new classes, which I might add, have the longest names I think I've ever used. One's named SynchronizedDynamicNestedBeanProperty. A little overkill, but gets the point across ;)... read more

Where we are ready or not, JBeans is going 1.0! We have finished testing and debugging and JBeans is ready for primetime.

In this release we included the Synchronized versions of the main property classes and some performance and bug fixes. We also included more tests in our preparation for this 1.0 release.

The only thing that we have had problems with in this release is getting the user_guide in the zip file. So, for now, until the zip file is updated, you'll have to browse the user guide online.... read more

The Alpha version of the user guide is available in the CVS repository. This version will be moved to the website as soon as possible, but for now you can get to it by pulling down the CVS repository and looking in the docs/user_guide directory.

This document is in a very rough state right now. Three days of continuous writting to finish it and I'm sure it really needs some work. But read through it and send typos and corrections to me or post them to the forum or submit them as a bug.... read more

The website was updated earlier today. It's not the best looking website, but it'll do for now.

I'm still waiting to get someone involved in doing the website. It needs a really solid look and a good mascot. So, we need a graphics artist (or illustrator) and someone to crank out the HTML.

At the same time, we still need more content in there. More documentation and more information. If you would like to help out, please send me email at brian@pontarelli.com and I can add you to the project and you can start rockin'

I've been working on thread safety with the JBeans package and I think I've got it working. I haven't done any tests yet, but the new classes compile and are in the CVS repository.

I was battling with how exactly to implement thread safety. Should I go with the concepts from the Collections API from Sun? Should I sub-class all the important classes? Should I provide a static interface for creating thread safe classes? ... read more

This is a copy of the news from the Java foundry.
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The JBeans project, also known as the new java.beans package, has released it's first version. The JBeans project is a complete re-implementation of the java.beans package. It addresses the deficiencies of Sun's implementation and tries to give developers a toolkit that can be used for everyday JavaBean coding.

The JBeans is package has the following features, full property support, nested property support, indexed property support, support for type conversions, automatic type conversions, support for simple retrieval and updating of bean properties and much more.... read more