Download

Getting the Files

You can download the most current source and binaries from the following directory:

download/

The available files, with notes about what to do with them, are as follows. Note that {v} represents the current version of FavaBeans (e.g., 0.3.7 or 0.4beta).

favabeans-{v}-src.tar.gz	Source release with XML sources for documentation. See the INSTALL file at the top level for additional software you will need to build and run this material.
favabeans-{v}.tar.gz	Binary release with developer documentation in HTML. You will need a copy of the JavaBeans Activation Framework (JAF) classes to run this.
favabeans-all-{v}.jar	Complete executable demo jarfile. Simply download this file and run it by typing java -jar favabeans-all-{v}.jar, or double-clicking on it in your desktop environment (if that is supported).

In all cases, you will need to have a JDK or JRE version 1.3.x to run FavaBeans; we do rely on a few small extensions in 1.3, which prevents us from running on 1.2.

Notes About the Standard Demo

1. This will display a simple "file browser" showing the contents of your home directory. You can use this in a limited fashion to move files around. This is buggy; don't use it to move any files you really care about. The bugs here are not central to FavaBeans; they exist simply because we were pressed for time in making up a demo FavaBeans app to send out for evaluation.

2. By right-clicking on an object, you can display the context menu for that object; this will allow you to open new views. You can also drag and drop objects around. Note that there are two ways to drop an object into a view: (a) you may drop it onto the object in the view; or (b) you may drop it into the view itself.

3. Note the "drop slots", which are quite fundamental to our OOUI paradigm. You can edit a property by dropping an object into its associated slot. Try moving a file, for example, by changing its parent property -- drop a directory into the drop slot and notice that the file moves.

4. You will also note that each view frame has a drop slot; this represents "the object currently being viewed". Try dropping another object into the drop slot of a view, and watch the contents change. Note that, if you have a list view displayed in a view frame, you cannot drop a regular file into the view frame because the list view "rejects" the file. A view frame will only accept objects that all its child views can sensibly show.

Notes About the pawm Demo

The entry point for the Palmtop Applications Window Manager (pawm) demo is class org.favabeans.demo.pawm.Main; you should specify this instead when you run the Java interpreter.

What you'll see should be functionally and visually very similar to the standard demo -- except that it'll all run in a 240x320 window (similar to a high-end color handheld display) and will have a "modal" look and feel. By double-clicking, you can open new objects; you can then close them via the "close box" on the top left hand corner. Notice that one of these views is "root-level", meaning that it cannot be closed; typically, this will contain the root objects presented to the end-user as starting points ("My Mailbox", "My Documents", etc.).

Finally...

This is a pretty bad excuse for a tutorial in the use of FavaBeans, and so we make no claims that it is one. We hope to remedy this as soon as we can. Please consider this a sneak peek, and keep stopping by or email us asking to be kept up to date.

Copyright 2000, 2001, Regents of the University of Minnesota. All rights reserved. ihab@ahc.umn.edu