The future, of course, always begins in the present. Best of all, you can purchase OCXs from independent software vendors and quickly add new functionality to your Basic application at a fraction of the cost of developing equivalent functionality yourself. G enerally speaking, nothing in Java is an innovation per se. Jim Gosling, one of the language's chief developers, has written that the Java language chose mainstream features and had demonstrated their practicality in other languages. Java, having started as an interpreted language, demonstrates and has taken great pains to retain the flexibility that interpreted languages.
Beans carry on that tradition and codify it.
But the main concepts of programming have changed little since the initial days of Unix. Moreover, application developers are on their own when they stray beyond the kinds of built-in objects their favorite tool provides. They get the least help and automation precisely when they need it the most. Beans, or design-time controls and components more generally, can change all that. Objects, with their own assistants to guide the developer, will have a significant effect on the kinds of applications that developers can tackle.