Confused about beans, packages, and jars

Question

Hello,
I've created a package that contains three public classes, Animation, Animator, and AnimatedPanel. I won't explain what they do, since it's rather irrelevant; It is important to note that AnimatedPanel extends JLabel. The package is com.buchuki.animations
What I want to do is place the AnimatedPanel onto a JPanel, in Forte. To do this, it appears that I have to make the AnimatedPanel a bean. (or do it using extra code, but that defeats the purpose of using an IDE). I understand the basics of beans, but not much more. I've searched these forums and skimmed the Java Bean tutorial, but haven't found anything helpful. (at least, not completely helpful! ;)
The problem is, I want to make a bean out of the class com/buchuki/animations/AnimatedPanel.class, but not out of the other two classes in that package. However, I will want to use those other two classes to interact with the AnimatedPanel class in the application I am using. (I'll import com.buchuki.animations.*;)
From what I've read, it appears that you have to run the jar command from the parent directory of the package (ie: in animations/com/buchuki/animations, I run the jar command from animations/). But that would include all files in com, would it not? I guess I don't know what to do at all, but how do I make a bean out of AnimatedPanel and yet keep the bean as a part of the package that uses the "helper" classes? Is it a semi-advanced entry in the manifest file?
Thanks,
Dusty

Answer 1

Ok, I've figured out a few things in my research, but it's still not working. I guess that the Java-Bean: True applies to only one package, and not to the jar archive as I first thought.
However, I'm still a little unsure how I can include the package in the jar archive as a part of my program; is it that I should use the extension mechanism mentioned in the jar tutorial?
And at any rate, even with a manifest file like this:
Name: com/buchuki/animations/AnimatedPanel.class
Java-Bean: True
and archiving with:
jar cfm mainfest.txt animations.jar com
This creates the archive, but when I try to add new Java Bean in forte, it says that the archive is not a valid bean. What am I missing? Did I mess up the package thing, the compilation... what?
Thanks again,
Dusty