Getting Started with Lotus BeanMachine

Building your first applet

To begin, start BeanMachine from the Programs menu of the Windows Start button. After BeanMachine starts, you'll be presented with the New Applet Wizard. The wizard is a great way to quickly make your first applet. In this example, you'll use it to add an animation to the 3 Lost Souls page.

Read the introduction to get familiar with the wizard, then, when you're ready, click on Next to move to the Animation tab. Since we want to add an animation for this example, select Yes, please. Now, click on Find to locate the first frame of the animation. In the "doc" folder, you'll find dot001.jpg. Use this image for the first frame.

BeanMachine identifies the remaining frames of the animation for you automatically. It does this by searching for other sequentially numbered files with the same base filename (dot002.jpg, dot003.jpg, etc. ) that reside in the the folder where the first frame was found. In this case, BeanMachine will find seven files to complete your first animation.

Next, decide how fast you want the animation to play. Try selecting the Medium speed for this example. You can preview your animation by pressing the Preview button.

That's all for animation -- it's that simple. Click on Finish when you're ready to move on. The Composer should now look like this:



That's it -- you've created your first Java animation! Now let's look at how to put it in motion. An easy way to do that is with a "connection."

A connection can be thought of as a command or interaction between two parts. Connections take the form of "when something happens (an event), do something else (an action)." The "do something else" can be any action, such as playing an audio clip, setting a property like background color, or, in our case, playing an animation.

Keep in mind that every action must be triggered by an event. By making connections, you direct which events trigger which actions. In our example, let's have the animation start playing when a button is clicked. So, before we can make our connection, we'll need to add a button.

adding a rollover button