Interactive Decision Spots for JavaBeans Composition

Component composition is either done manually in a component assembly tool or with specific applications (wizards). However, from the view of the application programmer this situation is not satisfactory. Wizards are not flexible enough and their creation requires sub-stantial efforts. Doing everything manually is annoying, requires quite a good knowledge of the used compo-nents and increases the training period of the application programmer considerably. This paper describes a new approach for composing a set of JavaBeans using so-called bean plans. A bean plan is a partial description of a set of beans and their wiring. It describes a semi-finished bean suite with some JavaBeans being already preconfigured and pre-connected and others being still isolated. The plan does not describe a fixed wiring of components, but can contain interactive decision spots, where the application programmer can interactively take some decisions about the composition. The application programmer can later complete the ensemble with any component assembly tool by defining missing connections and overriding preconfigured properties. The plan is shipped together with the bean suite and it relieves the application pro-grammer from routine configuration tasks.