Software Review:
NetObjects BeanBuilder 1.0, Part 3

Now that I had both of the beans in the applet area, I needed to work on the connections and parameters of the beans. By clicking the Details menu item in the Window menu, a new window appears which has two tabs (See Figure 2): Connections and Properties. The Properties section allows you to specify details such as font color, size, face, text, name, visible, etc, while the Connections tab is where you specify the interactions between the different beans used in your applet.

Figure 2 The Details Window (click for larger image)

For our test applet, I needed to make a connection between the Teletype bean and the HTML Parameter bean. I selected "Applet1" from the drop down list at the top of the work area, and opened the Details window to get to the Connections area. There I told the applet what to do: when the applet starts, get the source URL for the text file (for the Teletype bean) from the HTML Parameter bean, or rather, from the parameter on the Web page.

Now it was a simple matter of testing the applet out, which is accomplished by clicking the blue "Right Arrow" button on the top of the work area. BeanBuilder then brings up the AppletViewer and previews your applet. I found that I was able to add parameters to the generated HTML by setting a property on the properties sheet.

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This article first appeared in October, 1998