The JavaBeans Power Guide CD contains a collection of beans, builder tools and runtimes. This isn't just another collection of applets and publisher's editions. Instead it's full of beans you can use.
The CD is a cross-platform CD that should be mountable on the Mac, Solaris, Windows 95, and Windows NT 4.0. You can mount the CD using whatever method you normally use on your platform, probably filemanager in Solaris, and just sticking it in the drive on Mac and Windows.
There's no fancy installer. You can browse the directories as you would a hard drive. Most archives are provided in some compressed format. If you see anything you like copy it to your hard drive and decompress it there using a tool like unzip or StuffIt Expander.
The contents of the CD are divided into four directories:
Paul Moeller's LandscapeBean was one of the first freeware beans released. It draws random fractal landscape whenever its randomLandscape() method is invoked. The fractal engine was adapted from an applet by Chris Thornborrow at SGI. Documentation is included in the JAR archive. You can get the latest version of the LandscapeBean from http://www.oneimage.com/~moeller/paul/beans/BeanPage.html
Rogue Wave Software's JWidgets 3.0 bean collection includes a tree control, a cell grid, a tabbed panel, an image button, an image component, a slider, and more. An evaluation version is included on the CD. You can order the full version for $395 direct from Rogue Wave's web site at http://www.roguewave.com/.
Prospero Software Products' PSPNum bean subclasses java.awt.TextField
component. You use the PSPNum bean for decimal numbers with an edit mask that controls the display of numeric values in the edit box. For example,123.45 or US$123.45. Masking also allows you to deal with international variations in numeric input/display. Several demos of this bean are also included.
The full version of PSPNum costs $200.00 for the first license, $10.00 for each additional license. There are no runtime fees. You can find out more at http://www.prosperosoftware.co.uk/pspnum/numframe2.htm
Tek-Tools' Kawa is an simple yet powerful Java Integrated Development Environment for Windows 95, NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 that supports JavaBeans. A 45-day evaluation copy of Kawa 2.1.1 is included on the CD as a self-extracting .exe file. You can learn more about Kawa at http://www.tek-tools.com/. You can purchase the full version for $49 from Tek-Tools' website or call 1-888-866-KAWA or send email to contact@tek-tools.com.
StringBean.java
instead of STRINGBE~.JAV
. You should be able to copy these onto your hard drive, compile them, and run them. There are a couple of cases, most notably in Chapter 10, where one example was a modification of a previous class which did not change the previous class's name. In these cases, the later class has the correct name and the earlier class has a slightly modified name and will have to be renamed before you can compile it.
Please feel free to reuse any or all of this source code in your own projects. No specific permission is necessary or required.