Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

The question of the day comes from Ralf Eichinger, a few days ago in the comments in this blog: Coming from Java EE and starting to refresh my Swing knowledge, I found your very valuable blog entries. As I am just starting to have a look at the NetBeans Platform, I am confused at seeing the NetBeans menubar and toolbar in all the example applications. This makes me think that all applications implemented with the NetBeans Platform must beheavier than they should be (carrying...

Let's say your requirement is that you need to open a ZIP file into an application, modify its content, and then ZIP it all up again. And you're using the NetBeans Platform. Here's the general approach to take: Learn from Similar Code. The very first thing to do is to ask yourself: "Does NetBeans IDE or any other NetBeans Platform application do something similar?" The answer in this case is Yes because NetBeans IDE has "File | Import Project | From ZIP". So you can look in the...

A first step in porting an application, especially one you don't really know, is to run the application in the NetBeans debugger and then take a GUI snapshot of it. That lets you relate the GUI elements in the application to their source code, very easily, as shown below for Wandora: It's kind of similar to the Chrome integration for HTML5 applications! There, you can click in the browser and then see where items are defined in the IDE. In the above screenshot, you're actually...

Wandora is a general purpose information extraction, management and publishing application based on Topic Maps and Java. Wandora has a graphical user interface, layered and merging information model, multiple visualization models, huge collection of information extraction, import and export options, embedded HTTP server with several output modules and open plug-in architecture.  Here it is:  The sources are in a handy NetBeans project: Interestingly, attempts have been made to...

The highest ranked NetBeans theme on the truly brilliant NetBeans Themes site replicates Sublime Text and looks really great. Click to enlarge the screenshot below to see it in context in NetBeans IDE 7.3.1: I have no idea who is behind that NetBeans Themes site, but it's an amazing contribution to the NetBeans community. Just take a look at the themes on the site, choose one, download its ZIP file, go to Tools | Options in the IDE, click Import and then browse to the ZIP you...

I've been actively and naturally using Ubuntu since Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn", which means, of course, April 2007, as described here. Now let's flash forward six years or so to yesterday. Yesterday I was on 12.04 "Precise Pangolin", today on the latest version 13.04 "Raring Ringtail", which means I skipped 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal". In general, looking back in this blog over the years, I seem to have installed more "04" releases than "10" releases, which is interesting. I tend...

NetBeans IDE 7.3.1 is released, hurray, etc. Now let's look at using Ruby on Rails in NetBeans IDE 7.3.1. Go here, to the NetBeans plugin for JRuby maintained by Tom Enebo and the JRuby community (since there really isn't anyone better in the world to be responsible for a tooling plugin than the community itself) and click the Download button: http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/38549/ruby-and-rails Now you have a ZIP file. Unzip it. Go to Tools | Plugins in NetBeans IDE 7.3.1....

The question of the day comes from Michele Vigilante from Italy who wants to combine a Palette with a MultiViewElement. The two key references to solving this are the following: http://netbeans-org.1045718.n5.nabble.com/Adding-a-palette-to-MultiView-td3023439.html https://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/simple_component_palette Here's step by step how to put the pieces together, starting from the application described here: https://blogs.oracle.com/geertjan/entry/how_to_create_a_s...

Tough times in the world of Fosfor, the EPUB Open Toolbox. Turns out that while the JavaFX WebView has perfect rendering but no editing capabilities, the JavaFX HTMLEditor has perfect editing capabilities but crap rendering. Exhibit one is right here, with the JavaFX HTMLEditor on the left and the JavaFX WebView on the right, rendering the same XHTML file: As can be seen, the images, CSS, and entities defined in the XHTML file above are perfectly rendered in WebView, but not at...