Quick and easy development using the new Visual Editor for Java: Building Applications with IBM WebSphere Studio and JavaBeans.(WebSphere Studio)

In Building Applications with IBM WebSphere Studio and JavaBeans, my coauthor, Steph Parkin, and I take you on a guided tour of developing applications with the WebSphere Studio Visual Editor for Java and JavaBeans. With the Visual Editor, new with WebSphere Studio Version 5, you'll see how quick and easy it is to construct graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and use JavaBeans to build applications. This article gives you an introduction to the Visual Editor and shows examples of some of the applications you'll build with it when you follow the guided tour.

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Visual Editor for Java

The Visual Editor works very much like other visual design tools, such as VisualAge for Java's Visual Composition Editor. As you can see in Figure 1, the editor itself is composed of three parts: a palette of beans along the left edge of the window, a design surface where you visually work with beans, and just below that, a source pane with the source code for your program. The bean palette contains all the standard Java widgets for the Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) and Swing, as well as a Choose Bean option, which you can use to select any custom beans that aren't already built into the palette.

To …