Beans Binding: A Java Data-Binding Solution with a Serious Problem

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By Thierry.Lefort
via devx.com
Published: Nov 20 2008 / 11:48

In the past couple of years, data binding has emerged as an important concept for GUI development in Java. Its main objective is to simplify the task of syncing a data object's properties with their visual representations on the screen (text fields, tables, combo boxes, etc). JSR 295 (Beans Binding for Java, or simply Beans Binding) aims to deliver a default data-binding specification for the Java platform. Although JSR 295 is not yet part of the official JDK, you can download the reference implementation (at the time of writing, version 1.2.1). The last version was released in November 2007, with no new updates since

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jfpoilpret replied ago:

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It seems the linked page does not allow comments, so I will comment hereon dzone.
As the author said, the main problem is not really in beans-binding itself but more in Java, the language (and the beans specification).
However, I think that there are actually 2 problems (not just one):
- need for your POJOs to support PropertyChangeListener (lot of boilerplate code, as mentioned by the author)
- referencing Bean properties by name (ie String constants) which means no compile-time checking possible. That's really the main pain-point for me and fixing that would require quite some changes in the language (I am in favor of replacing the outdated bean spec with more modern property support)
Developers cannot afford many repeated cycles "code, compile, run, check" in this area, that's too time-consuming.