A close cousin to CGI scripts, JAVA beans are usually compact pieces of object oriented code that controls the manipulation of a particular piece of data. For example, if you had a business that sold cars, you might write a few JAVA Beans to handle information about your order. Some beans might manipulate car features, while other beans might control the interaction for interest rates on loans. The core benefit behind bean technology, is that a group of developers can create beans irrespective of how their co-workers are creating beans. Once the project is finished, the lead programmers can use each of the beans instantly.
A JavaBean is a Java class that defines properties and that communicates with other Beans via events. Properties can be defined within the JavaBean class definition, or they can be inherited from other classes. A Bean, however, is not required to inherit from any particular class or interface.