A Bean is an independent, reusable software module. They may encapsulate data structures or user visible GUI components. Tools can discover a Beans features. A Bean s feature is defined in terms of properties, methods and events. Properties are a Bean's appearance and behavior characteristics.
Beans expose properties so that they can be examined and customized at design time.
Beans support the AWT event model we had discussed earlier. A bean can listen for particular events . Tools can determine which events a bean is capable of generating and which it can receive. A Bean s methods are identical to java class methods. The focus of beans are on providing a programmatic interface which is easy for other software to understand.