soooo many questions!

Hello kind professional java programmers!

I am a former soldier trying to re-establish himself in the civilian
world and I have so many questions.  First of all, what does it really
take to create a java bean that does anything?  A friend of mine who
is exploring servlets was very shocked to discover how much work it
takes to create a dropdown HTML menu in Java, so I thought I would
have a go at it.

I thought my javabean should have properties for the:
 name of the HTML dropdown menu,
 a default <option> tag (to handle when user selects nothing),
 a size,
 and an SQL statement that when executed would yield 2 columns, the
first being the non-zero id of the row we got             from the
database(for the "value" part of an option tag), and the second column
being the displayed part of the
option tag.

Anyway, I haven not handled getting the data from database yet, but
what else must i do or include to make it a bean, and how then would I
use it for a bean inside a JSP page?

/
*******************************************************************************************************************
 *
 * DropDownHTML
 *
 *   This code creates a serializable object (that might someday
become a Java Bean) that, given an SQL statement,
 * and a connection to the appropriate database, will produce a
dropdown menu in HTML, as a string via the toString
 * method.
 
*******************************************************************************************************************/


im****t java.io.*;		// we will sup****t serialization


public class DropDownHTML implements Serializable
{
	private String	SqlStatement; 		// SQL for 2 columns: first column is
value part, second column is display part
	private String 	Name; 				// html name for the the drop down menu
	private String 	HandleNoChoice; 	// if they choose nothing, this will
be displayed -- always has 0 value
	private int    	Size; 				// size of the display in rows, not the
number of actual rows
	private boolean	SelectMoreThanOne;	// can user choose more than one?
	transient int 	nRows;

	public DropDownHTML()
	{
		this.SqlStatement = new String("select * from categories");
		this.Name	= new String("example_drop_down");
		this.HandleNoChoice = new String("<option selected value=\"0\">No
selection has been choosen</option>");
		this.Size = 4;
		this.SelectMoreThanOne = false;
	}

	public DropDownHTML(String mySQLStatement,String myDropDownName, int
size,boolean single  )
	{
		this.SqlStatement = new String(mySQLStatement);
		this.Name	= new String(myDropDownName);
		this.HandleNoChoice = new String("<option selected value=\"0\">No
selection has been choosen</option>");
		this.Size = size;
		this.SelectMoreThanOne = single;
	}

	public String toString()
	{
		String selectMoreThanOne = new String ((this.SelectMoreThanOne) ?
"MULTIPLE " : "SINGLE ");

		String selectHTML = new String("<SELECT ") + selectMoreThanOne +
"SIZE=\'" + this.Size + "\' name=\'" + this.Name + "\'>";
		String endSelectHTML = new String("</SELECT>");
		return selectHTML + endSelectHTML;
	}

}