Using plans for specifying preconfigured bean sets

Component composition is either done manually in a component assembly tool or with specific applications (wizards). However, from the view of the application programmer this situation is not satisfactory. Wizards are not flexible enough and their creation requires substantial efforts. Doing everything manually is annoying, requires quite a good knowledge of the used components and increases the training period of the application programmer considerably. This paper describes a new approach for composing a set of JavaBeans using so-called bean plans. A bean plan is a partial description of a set of beans and their wiring. It describes a semi-finished bean suite with some JavaBeans being already preconfigured and preconnected and others being still isolated. The application programmer can later complete the ensemble with any component assembly tool by defining missing connections and overriding preconfigured properties. The plan is shipped together with the bean suite and it relieves the application programmer from routine configuration tasks, BeanPlan is the scripting language for writing bean plans and is described.