The PSPNum JavaBean is a special type of visual control dedicated to decimal numbers. It is available as two Java classes: 1) PSPNum which extends the AWT TextField component and 2) PSPNumS which extends the Swing JTextField component. Apart from their inheritance, the two classes are virtually identical.

You use an edit mask to control display of numeric values in the edit box e.g. 123.45- or US$123.45CR. Masking also allows you to deal with international variations in numeric input/display.

For each PSPNum, you can specify exactly how many digits you want either side of the decimal place. For the selected size of number, the numeric value is represented completely accurately - there is no 'degree of precision'. Internal operations use zoned decimal and packed decimal formats. PSPNum also accurately supports a range of common mathematical and array operations, so are particularly suitable for monetary (money, currency) numbers.

So PSPNum stores and manipulates numeric values much more reliably than floating-point data types. This functionality is provided by our integrated PSPDec class, which is separately available.

The PSPNum JavaBean is written to fully respect Java standards in all areas - naming conventions, documentation, event-handling etc. PSPNum uses a number of features of Java version 1.2. To use PSPNum in Java applets, you therefore need a fairly up-to-date browser which fully supports Java 1.2. For stand-alone Java applications, PSPNum should work fine as long as you have up-to-date Java runtimes (VM, DLLs etc).

Our development platforms are primarily Windows 2000 and Linux RedHat. On these platforms we have tested PSPNum fully using the Sun BDK Version 1.0 (March 1998 release) and the Sun Java WorkShop tool. As part of 100% Pure Java certification, PSPNum has been fully tested on Solaris 2.6 and IBM AIX 4.2. We have not tested PSPNum on other platforms such as the Apple Mac. We welcome feedback from users as to how PSPNum functions on all platforms.