Interface
Definition: Any good component technology should
allow for defining properties and generate and
respond to events. This is very important since this
information is used to integrate the component with
third party components.
Property
Sheets/Pages: Any good component technology should
allow graphical editing of properties. Since almost
all environments support Graphical User Interfaces,
it is only logical to expect that components can be
configured graphically with a GUI interface that it
provides.
Interface
Messaging Mechanisms: The component
technology should provide the ability to define
methods which can be called by any third party
software or scripting tool that uses the component.
Bridging: The component
technology should provide mechanisms by which these
components could be tied together.
| Criteria |
JavaBeans |
ActiveX
Controls |
| Interface Definition |
Introspection provides a way by
which a component can autodescribe itself. It
does this either using the BeanInfo class if
it is provided or uses the Reflection APIs if
it is not provided. |
The Interface Definition files
(IDLs) define a component’s properties,
methods and events that need to be exposed.
There are wizards that can create IDLs for
the programmer. |
| Property sheets/pages |
Customization allows a Bean to
guide user initialization of the Bean through
a property sheet. |
Property pages that come with
the components help the user customize the
control. |
| Messaging |
The Java event model ensures
that proper messaging takes place and the
right methods are called as approprate. |
(D)COM ensures that these
controls talk to each other’s exposed
interface methods either across different
processes or machines. |
| Bridging |
The Event model ensures that
various beans written to the Bean spec can be
bridged by registering listeners. |
These controls are bridged
together through events. If any of these
events use parameters, these are included in
the signature of the event being called. |
More
coming soon...
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