JavaBeans and Images

Most bean building tools I've discovered so far have no way to stick images or icons on JLabels or JButtons, which is a bit of a pain. I assume this comes down to the fact that Image isn't serialisable, so as soon as you put one on a JLabel for instance, the JLabel isn't really a bean.

I was thinking of a few ways around it ..

(1) Make a sub-class of Image which is serialisable, and has two instance variables, (a) an image object, which we'll make transient, and (b) a resource identifier that can be used to get to this image, perhaps through JNDI. That way, it's serialisable because the only member is a string.

(2) Make a sub-class of Icon which does a similar thing.

(3) Make wrappers around JLabel, JButton, etc, and again, do the same thing.

Number 3 is the only one which works easily using the existing GUIs, but it strikes me as a rather heavy-handed way to get the functionality we want here. "All we want" is a way to drag and drop images and image-rendered components to make games. (Although, now that I look at the requirement, it sounds a bit like doctor evil asking for sharks with laser beams on their heads.)

Number 1 and 2 would be really clean, if only the building tools around had the concept of images. (Hell, JBuilder doesn't even allow you to select the icons for buttons using its visual designer. It has a drop down box for it, which is always empty. Why bother?)

Is there any obvious way around all this, or will we be wrapping every single useful swing class to get this functionality? Perhaps there's a bean builder out there that can do images with less pain?

[1658 byte] By [trejkaz] at [2007-9-26 9:08:24]