Donna, I'm glad you're in a position to go on and have fun.
I stayed out of the conversation about what a JavaBean is. With such promiscuous access to mutable content, I find them rather offensive as far as objects go. They are slightly dressed up raw data structures, necessary to provide data or component information to some frameworks, but not necessarily a "good thing". Still, I use them without guilt (but without pleasure) when some API calls for them.