Using Plans for Specifying Preconfigured Bean Sets

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 flexiple enough and their creation requires substantial efforst. Doing everything manually is annnoying, requires quite a good knowledge of the used components and increases the training period of the application programmer considerably. This paper describes a new approach for composing (wiring) a set of JavaBeans using so-called bean plans. A bean plan is a partial description of a set of beans and their wiring. The component programmer (e.g.: Beana) ships this description of a semi-finished wiring together with the bean suite. The application programmer (e.g. Applicato) can later complete the wiring with any component assembly tool.