Bean Tips
Some tips with those who are/will be playing with BDK BeanBox so that you won't have to lose too much hair.

  1. Make sure your CLASSPATH is explicitly set! For Windows 2000 it appears that you need to explicitly set you CLASSPATH so that the beanbox can see java. To do so

  2. If you are making a bean and want to see the changes made to it, it seems you have to restart beanbox to reload the jar or the changes won't show.

  3. This is a biggie: Since JDK 1.4, the beanbox will not import classes from the default package. I.E., If you have classes in your jar that need to access each other, you need to put them into a package. Here is an example of what happens if you do not: It really is not doing this. SO, explicitly give your classes a package name

  4. If you do not explicitly give default values for each of your Instance and Class Variables, they might not show up in the variable panel.
    You will see the beanbox say something about "Skip"...

  5. Don't forget the partial manifest file (manifest.stub) in the jar

  6. If you are using other packages in your bean such as Swing 1.0.1, make sure the beanbox invocation environment has the correct classpath to the package. One student wrote: "In my version of BDK(Feb 98), the beanbox is started through a batch file, run.bat. It wipes out your default CLASSPATH so you will have to modify the file to include the current %CLASSPATH% if you have anything in your bean that requires it. "