Why use JavaBeans? Are JavaBeans anything more than just regular class files that follow certain structural criteria? In all of my research, the word reusability comes up a lot.
Could someone give me a real-world example of where a JavaBean could be used in one application and then re-used in another?
Using beans is a very common practice in JSP application development. This approach is popular because JavaBeans introduces reusability. This is to say, rather than building your own piece of code, you can simply use what other people have written. For example, you can purchase a bean for file upload and start uploading files within 30 seconds.
Even more than reusability, JavaBeans offer predictability. Because they follow a standard convention, they can be manipulated by reflection so that things like the standard JSP actions and the Expression Language can act upon them.
Sorry, I mispelt the word so that might have made it difficult to look up.
It's actually predictability and its definition is here.
Essentially, since beans follow a specific pattern for the accessors and mutators (getters and setters), reflection code can predict how to get and set the properties of a bean.
