Instantiate a bean.
The bean is created based on a name relative to a class-loader.
This name should be a dot-separated name such as "a.b.c".
In Beans 1.0 the given name can indicate either a serialized object
or a class. Other mechanisms may be added in the future. In
beans 1.0 we first try to treat the beanName as a serialized object
name then as a class name.
When using the beanName as a serialized object name we convert the
given beanName to a resource pathname and add a trailing ".ser" suffix.
We then try to load a serialized object from that resource.
For example, given a beanName of "x.y", Beans.instantiate would first
try to read a serialized object from the resource "x/y.ser" and if
that failed it would try to load the class "x.y" and create an
instance of that class.
If the bean is a subtype of java.applet.Applet, then it is given
some special initialization. First, it is supplied with a default
AppletStub and AppletContext. Second, if it was instantiated from
a classname the applet's "init" method is called. (If the bean was
deserialized this step is skipped.)
Note that for beans which are applets, it is the caller's responsiblity
to call "start" on the applet. For correct behaviour, this should be done
after the applet has been added into a visible AWT container.
Note that applets created via beans.instantiate run in a slightly
different environment than applets running inside browsers. In
particular, bean applets have no access to "parameters", so they may
wish to provide property get/set methods to set parameter values. We
advise bean-applet developers to test their bean-applets against both
the JDK appletviewer (for a reference browser environment) and the
BDK BeanBox (for a reference bean container).
Parameters:
- cls - the class-loader from which we should create
the bean. If this is null, then the system
class-loader is used.
- beanName - the name of the bean within the class-loader.
For example "sun.beanbox.foobah"
- beanContext - The BeanContext in which to nest the new bean
- initializer - The AppletInitializer for the new bean
Throws:
- java.lang.ClassNotFoundException - if the class of a serialized
object could not be found.
- java.io.IOException - if an I/O error occurs.