Visual builder tools (such as Symantec Visual Cafe) have the ability to fetch information from a Java Bean, essentially asking questions of bean. For example, Visual Cafe may ask a bean, "What properties do you have?", "What methods do you have?", "What events do you generate?", etc. This makes it possible for Visual Cafe to present a user interface that allowing non-programmers to visually manipulate beans without writing code. Introspection is actually a bean specific application of Java's Core Reflection API.