Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Sometimes you're coding and you find yourself forgetting your context. For example, look at this situation: The cursor is on line 52. Imagine you're coding there and you're puzzling on some problem for some time. Wouldn't it be handy to know, without scrolling up (and then back down again to where you were working), what the method signature looks like? And does the method begin two lines above the visible code or 10 lines? That information can now, in NetBeans IDE 7.3 (and...

The final step is to put an object into the Lookup on key listening in each of the JEditorPanes, e.g., a "City" object for the CityEditorPane and a "Country" object for the CountryEditorPane. Then, within the CompletionProviders, only add items to the CompletionResultSet if the object of interest is in the Lookup. The result is that you can then have different code completions in different JEditorPanes, as shown below: I've also included the Tools | Options | Editor |...

Figured it out! No need to create a fake Java file, unlike what I said in part 1, no need to depend on all the Java Editor modules, if you use DialogBinding.bindComponentToDocument, instead of DialogBinding.bindComponentToFile: public final class CountryEditorTopComponent extends TopComponent { public CountryEditorTopComponent() { initComponents(); setName(Bundle.CTL_CountryEditorTopComponent()); ...

Go here to watch a really cool BOF, which was run late at night at some stage during the past week's JavaOne 2012, and which I really enjoyed even though I was falling asleep due to jetlag. (I literally woke up a few times, which means I must have been sleeping.) I loved it even though it was on a topic that doesn't really interest me as such, I just happen to know the speaker. (And I was too tired to stumble back to the hotel for a nap so thought I'd do so while attending a...

One unique aspect of the NetBeans community presence at JavaOne 2012 was its usage of large panels to highlight and discuss various aspects (e.g., Java EE, JavaFX, etc) of NetBeans IDE usage and tools. For example, here's a pic of one of the panels, taken by Markus Eisele: Above you see me, Sean Comerford from ESPN.com, Gerrick Bivins from Halliburton, Angelo D'Agnano and Ioannis Kostaras from the NATO Programming Center, and Çağatay Çivici from PrimeFaces. (And Tinu Awopetu...

Code completion in a JEditorPane: Unfortunately, a lot of this solution depends on the Java Editor support in the IDE. Therefore, to use it, in its current state, you'll need lots of Java Editor related JARs even though your own application probably doesn't include a Java Editor. A key thing one needs to do is implement the NetBeans Code Completion API, using the related tutorial in the NetBeans Platform Learning Trail, but register the CompletionProvider as follows: @MimeRegistr...

A brand new video (published today) of the 2012 Blind and Visually Impaired computer Programming (BVIP 2012) camp at the Washington State School for the Blind. In this video, teachers and students are highlighted learning to write computer software using the Sodbeans IDE, a derivative of NetBeans IDE, together with the Quorum programming language.

More often than not, the reason that Eclipse has more plugins than NetBeans IDE is because Eclipse has far less features out of the box. For example, thanks to its out of the box support, NetBeans IDE doesn't need a Maven plugin and it doesn't need a Java EE plugin, which are two of the most popular plugins for Eclipse. However, what would be great for NetBeans IDE to have is support for Android. It's existed for a while, thanks to the community-driven NBAndroid project, but...

Since I pretty much messed up this part of the "Unlocking Java EE 6 Platform" demo, which I did together with PrimeFaces lead Çağatay Çivici during JavaOne 2012, I feel obliged to blog about it to clarify what should have happened! In my own defense, I only learned about this feature 15 minutes before the session started. In 7.3 Beta, it works for Java SE projects, while for Maven-based web projects, you need a post 7.3 Beta build, which is what I set up for my demo right...