Rendering Thin Beans

Part of the development of a servlet is rendering the HTML that is to be displayed in a browser. The set of BI Beans includes thin beans that simplify this rendering.

A thin bean has two parts: an implementation of the ThinBeanUI interface, and a bean class that is a UIX UINode. You explicitly associate a ThinBeanUI with a UINode . A UINode can display a single ThinBeanUI object, or you can use the same UINode to render different ThinBeanUI objects.

The thin beans generate HTML that includes events. An event generates an HTTP request when a user clicks some part of the HTML page, such as a hyperlink or a button. The thin beans render these events in the HTML that they generate, and they handle events. The thin beans use form fields to transfer information in these events, so you must add each thin bean to a form. A single form can contain more than one thin bean. You then put the form in an HTML page.

Cascading style sheet files (CSS files) provide styles for formatting the HTML that the thin beans render. In order to display HTML pages that include thin beans, your servlet must import a dynamically created CSS file into the <HEAD> element of the HTML page.