Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Well, I've learned a lot of cool things about the NetBeans APIs over the years, but this probably takes the cake. All you need to do if you want an editable diff viewer is put a FileObject into the Lookup of a Node and then you can reuse the standard Diff Action that's part of NetBeans IDE. In the right pane, you can type, i.e., the right pane is editable. All the editing functionality, e.g., code completion, is available too. That's exactly how it is when using NetBeans...

Some time ago, Timon Veenstra from Ordina wrote about how to create MultiViewElements for Nodes. A follow up question is... how to enable the Save Action for MultiViewElements that have been created for Nodes? The constructor of a MultiViewElement always receives a Lookup. But how to add a Saveable object to that Lookup so that the Save Action can become enabled? My solution is weird, but the only thing that I can think of: put the InstanceContent into the Node's Lookup, i.e.,...

Olivier Schmitt from the French Ministry of Agriculture has forked and enhanced the code I recently blogged about for creating annotations for generating code completion support for NetBeans-based editors. His fork is here: https://github.com/olivier-schmitt/netbeans-poc/tree/master/completion/xhtml/annotated/CompletionRegistrationSupport He reports that "the new thing is about telling the completion provider registration layer what is 'source' for completion items. My idea is...

While looking for a good candidate language for creating tutorials around language support using the NetBeans APIs, I recently came across the PowerJava project. I was kind of curious about the background and purpose of this language and so contacted Fabio Filippi, from the Università degli Studi di Torino, the developer behind the language (pictured, right). I asked him a couple of questions. Hi Fabio, how did PowerJava come to be? I started working on PowerJava in 2011. This...

Let's get started creating an application from scratch integrating the NetBeans Diff Viewer. Create a new application: Give it a name and store it somewhere: Create a new module: Give it a name and store it somewhere: Give it a unique identifier and display name: Right-click the application, choose Properties, go to Libraries, and select "Diff" from the "ide" cluster and then click the Resolve button to include the related modules: Create a new Action: Let it always be enabled: Speci...

Once you have a ParserResult, as described yesterday, you also need to have access to some kind of AST node, i.e., not only tokens. Tokens let you distinguish between individual characters in a document, but that's not enough if you want to create code folding for your editor. Below you see code folding for PowerJava, which is an extension to Java 1.5 for role programming. It has about 8 special keywords, which in my editor are shown in orange, as can be seen for two of them...

When using the CSL API, you should not use org.netbeans.spi.editor.fold.FoldManager directly. It is too heavyweight, when compared to the alternative provided by the CSL API:  org.netbeans.modules.csl.api.StructureScanner. If you have a class like this, i.e., extending org.netbeans.modules.csl.spi.DefaultLanguageConfig and using the org.netbeans.modules.csl.spi.LanguageRegistration annotation, then you can pass in a StructureScanner, as shown below: package org.simplejava;impor...

Continuing from yesterday, another source of data for code completion could be data extracted from JSON via an online RESTful web service, such as this one: http://api.worldbank.org/country?format=json I'm not trying to make the argument that it's useful to integrate World Bank data into the code completion box in the NetBeans HTML Editor, but simply that it's possible to do so (and you might have, more realistically, customer data exposed via a RESTful web service that you'd...

I reduced all the code shown yesterday, by Olivier Schmitt, who works on NetBeans at the French Ministry of Agriculture, to this: Wait a minute, what happened to all of Olivier's code? How can the code completion for the "lang" attribute in text/xhtml work if there's no code in the module at all? Well, the answer is found in the "package-info.java" class above: @HTMLAttributeCompletionRegistration( ...