babapp.gif (125 bytes) Basic Application Beans

Java class
com.ibm.bab

Use Basic Application Beans (BAB) to develop applets and applications.  The BAB family of visual and non-visual beans gives you many of the basic components you need to develop a program.  You can use BAB to create your programs in a visual composition environment such as VisualAge for Java.  BAB also gives you a simple, flexible framework that allows you to easily adapt the beans to your specific needs.    

BAB uses the framework and many of the classes from Swing.  BAB's simple framework is provided by the BAB App bean. Using the BAB App bean, you connect buttons, menus, and action beans together. The BAB App bean provides properties such as name, description, app icon, file extension, version and copyright, so you don't have to program these properties in each bean.  

You can run your program as an applet or application without additional programming using the AppContext feature of the BAB App bean.  Because BAB extends Swing, you can easily add basic document commands such as New, Open, Save and Save As and limitless undo and redo of commands,  such as cut, copy and paste.  

Some of the other beans included in BAB are: