22.11. BeanContext and BeanContextServices

So far we’ve talked about some sophisticated mechanisms for connecting Java beans together at design time and runtime. However, we haven’t talked at all about the environment in which Java beans live. To build advanced, extensible applications, we’d like a way for Java beans to find each other or “rendezvous” at runtime. The java.beans.beancontext package provides this kind of container environment. It also provides a generic “services” lookup mechanism for beans that wish to advertise their capabilities. These mechanisms have existed for some time, but they haven’t found much use in the standard Java packages. Still, they are interesting and important facilities that you can use in your own applications.

You can find a full explanation and example of how to use the bean context to find beans and listen for services in the expanded material on this book’s web site.