Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

It seems to me that more and more desktop applications are custom web browsers, receiving content from the web, but displaying it in their own frame, instead of the frame provided by FireFox or Internet Explorer, since those frames are too generic and don't provide all the required features to satisfy specific business requirements. The Cloud is ubiquitous but standard web browsers provide a very limited view on the wealth of data it makes available. Mobile phones and tablets...

An excellent follow-up question to yesterday's blog entry was: "How do you get a TopComponent that is not a singleton to open and listen to the global lookup? As far as I understand this example applies only for TopComponents that are already open." Here's a simple solution to the above problem. Create a module installer (via the Module Install template, so that the class will be registered correctly in the manifest) and define it like this: public class Installer extends...

A big flashing warning sign that your NetBeans Platform application isn't as mature & idiomatic, i.e., as loosely coupled, as it could be is if you have an Open Action (or something similar) that performs things like this: @ActionID(category = "Customer",id = "org.customer.viewer.nodes.OpenCustomerActionListener")@ActionRegistration(displayName = "#CTL_OpenCustomerActionListener")@Messages("CTL_OpenCustomerActionListener=Open Customer")public final class...

#JDC2012 (http://jdc2012.egjug.org), the biggest and most important meeting place for software developers in Middle East and Africa, here in Cairo is turning out to be a cool place to try out my Arabic. Part of the presentations are in English, so I've attended a keynote by Oracle's Mike Keith and Vaadin's Joonas so far, pity I missed Kees Jan Koster's & Mark Clarke's sessions yesterday, because I flew into Cairo very late last night; unfortunately also missed Lukáš Fryč...

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1849517126?tag=pulist-20 The book is by NetBeans Dream Team member Tushar Joshi. I am very much looking forward to it being published so I can get my hands on it!

The JIDE Common Layer, which is an open source product, has some nicely configurable tabbed panes that can now, following the instructions introduced yesterday, be used in NetBeans Platform applications. Here are some examples: And here's two examples of more generic NetBeans Platform applications using the JideTabbedPane: Note that only the appearance is different. The behavior is unchanged, for example, when you right-click a tab, you get all the standard NetBeans Platform...

Even better than the multi-row editor tabs in the upcoming NetBeans IDE 7.2 is how this new feature has been implemented. I guess Stan Aubrecht, the NetBeans window system engineer, must have thought: "If anyone ever wants a different tab layout ever again, they're just going to have to create it themselves!" In a pluggable system, a thought like the above is supported very well indeed and so the NetBeans Platform now allows custom implementations of tab control. In a...

The latest, i.e., March 2012, edition of the German iX Magazine (the "magazine for professional information technology") landed on my doormat today. Nice and shiny and glossy, at 170 pages, the general look and feel of this magazine reminds me of Dr Dobbs, covering the whole range of hot software development topics, from Cloud to Android, from Apache Solr to NoSQL. From page 64 to 66, a review of NetBeans IDE 7.1 is published, by Michael Müller. The title is: "NetBeans 7.1:...

Has the final frontier been reached for Java EE 6 tools in NetBeans IDE? In the daily builds for the upcoming NetBeans IDE 7.2, there is now code completion in calls to EntityManager.createNamedQuery of named queries defined within JPA entity classes: Above, the cursor is between the quotation marks in "em.createNamedQuery". Now all possible named queries are shown, from all entity classes in the application, and as I type the completion box narrows to match the currently...