Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

On java.net I saw that Kirk Pepperdine is reigniting his Defect Driven Design paradigm in his blog, here. So that's a good excuse to republish in my blog my all time favorite interview for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, with Kirk himself, where he introduces me to the wonderful world of D3. In 4 minutes you'll know exactly what that means if you watch this interview. And it's quite fun too. Enjoy! The movie was made very late at night (or possibly very early in the morning)...

Terrence Barr, technologist, evangelist, and speaker on mobile and embedded technologies at Oracle (and before that at Sun), wrote a cool overview of the state of embedded technologies in/on NetBeans, click the article below to get to the blog entry and leave your thoughts there or here:

The Maven equivalent of the NetBeans Platform Runtime Container Tutorial would consist of this application structure: To get there, simply set this in the dependencies section of the NetBeans Platform application POM: <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>org.netbeans.modules</groupId> <artifactId>org-netbeans-core-startup</artifactId> <version>RELEASE71-BETA</version> <type>jar</type> </dependency></dependencies> The other five JARs will then...

Today I got a question about whether the tabs in the NetBeans window system could be at the bottom of the editor space. I.e., tabs to the south.  Here you go: Above, you can see that all the tabs in all the windows are now at the bottom instead of the top of the mode. However, unfortunately, I had to hack the "Tab Control" module to make this work. Here's the related issue: http://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=205809 Feel free to add your comments to the issue and to vote...

One of the NetBeans Platform 7.1 API enhancements is the @MultiViewElement.Registration annotation. That lets you add a new tab to any existing NetBeans editor. Really powerful since I didn't need to change the sources (or even look at the sources) of the Java editor to add the "Visualizer" tab to it, as shown below: Right now, the tab doesn't show anything, that will come in the next blog entry. The point here is to show how to set things up so that you have a new tab in the...

...in a NetBeans RCP application, what additional JARs will you need to include for the Groovy Editor to work? Leaving aside the debate on the current state & quality of the NetBeans Groovy Editor, so, assuming you need the Groovy support that the NetBeans Groovy Editor provides, you would check the Groovy Editor checkbox in the Project Properties dialog of your application: As you can see, however, the Groovy Editor depends on other modules, some of which, in turn, depend on...

Here's a very cool thing that I keep forgetting about but that Jesse reminded me of in the recent blog entries on Undo/Redo: "surviveFocusChange=true". Look at the screenshot below. You see two windows with a toolbar button. The toolbar button is enabled whenever an object named "Bla" is in the Lookup. The "Demo" window has a "Bla" object in its Lookup and hence the toolbar button is enabled when the focus is in the "Demo" window, as shown below: Now the focus is in the...

Once you've set up the NetBeans Platform sources as your NetBeans Platform, you're able to debug the NetBeans Platform itself. That's an occasional question (certainly not a frequent question) on the mailing list and in NetBeans Platform courses: "Is it possible to debug the NetBeans Platform?" Well, here's how: Firstly, set up the NetBeans Platform sources as your NetBeans Platform. Now, open into NetBeans IDE the NetBeans module where you'd like to place a breakpoint. That in...

By default, when you create a new NetBeans module, the 'development IDE' is the platform to which you'll be deploying your module. It's a good idea to create your own platform and check that into your own repo, so that everyone working on your project will be able to work with a standardized platform, rather than whatever happens to be beneath the development IDE your using. Something else you can do is use the NetBeans sources as your platform, once you've checked them out....