BDK and the BeanBox

To develop Java Beans, you need a copy of the Beans Development Kit (BDK), which can obtained from Sun's JavaBeans home page. The BDK contains a reference Bean container, the BeanBox, and various example Beans with source code. The javadoc-generated API reference for the BDK is included in the download. The BDK also requires that you have installed the Java Development Kit 1.1 or later (for the current release of the BDK, as of March 1998, Sun recommends that you have installed JDK 1.1.4 or later).

The BeanBox provided by Sun is not an application development environment, but more of a testing tool. It does, however, provide a demonstration of how more complex development tools could behave. The BeanBox handles visible Beans, meaning those with a GUI representation, and invisible Beans, such as those which are just computational objects. As a testing tool, the BeanBox can be used to test the properties, events and serialization of your Beans. And it can be used to build simple applets.