Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

One of the best things about delivering NetBeans Platform courses is the direct interaction you have with developers using NetBeans IDE. Each and every time I'm delivering a course several of the conversations I end up in go like this: NetBeans User: NetBeans IDE is really cool, I've become really very productive very quickly. Me: Great! NetBeans User: However, there's always a few things that are not optimal, of course. Me: Oh? Such as what? NetBeans User: Well, the world isn't...

What's the point of spending time developing a plugin for NetBeans IDE to use Wicket? After all, everyone should be using JSF because JSF rocks and is the best thing out there and it is the official framework from the point of view of GlassFish and GlassFish is the main application server we should be supporting for the open source Java community, etc etc? Well, if the above is what you're thinking, read these words by Jeff Schwartz, one of the big supporters of the NetBeans...

I blogged a few weeks ago about how you can create a menu bar that overrides the NetBeans Platform's menu bar. (Read about it here.) And, in your own menu bar, you can align the components to the right and create a Web-like effect for mousing over the menus. (Read about that here.) But I learned something else related to all that this week. Here's the problem that started my new "learning moment": As you can see, there's a small space to the right of "Welcome Guest >>", i.e.,...

Here's how to get started creating a new root node (below the new root node is labeled "Universe") in the Databases section of the NetBeans IDE Services window: import java.util.ArrayList;import java.util.List;import org.netbeans.api.db.explorer.node.NodeProvider;import org.netbeans.api.db.explorer.node.NodeProviderFactory;import org.openide.nodes.AbstractNode;import org.openide.nodes.Children;import org.openide.nodes.Node;import org.openide.util.Lookup;public class...

Here's how to (or how I) create a web start enabled application, as well as NBM files for all your modules, plus an "updates.xml" update center registry, in a Maven based NetBeans Platform application: <build>     <plugins>         <plugin>             <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>             <artifactId>nbm-maven-plugin</artifactId>             <executions>                 <execution>                     <id>updatesite</id>                     <phase>package</phase>   ...

When you have multiple NetBeans Platform application projects, there's no way to see which module belongs to which suite. Several NetBeans Platform developers have stated they have a problem with this, i.e., it is inconvenient. Well, I haven't solved that problem.  But I did play with this interesting class which I'd never heard about before: org.netbeans.spi.project.ProjectIconAnnotator The result is that now I can distinguish between applications, modules that belong to...

Sometimes you're not using some kind of tree component to display data. Instead, you're viewing one customer instance at a time, with buttons for going "Next" and "Previous". I tried to set up the above scenario and here's the result: public final class CustomerViewerTopComponent extends TopComponent { public CustomerViewerTopComponent() { initComponents(); setName(NbBundle.getMessage(CustomerViewerTopComponent.class, "CTL_CustomerViewerTopComponent")); ...

I created a Prolog Editor for NetBeans IDE 7.0, which meant no more than updating the GeeWhiz Prolog Editor. It provides a few cool features, as can be seen below: I have also installed the Prolog Editor into other applications on the NetBeans Platform, where it works fine, too. In a NetBeans Platform application, you can also take a JEditorPane and bind it to the "text/x-prolog" MIME type provided by the Prolog Editor, which will enable the syntax coloring to be applied to...

I recently saw a cool demo of the current state of the Sepix Sales System (which is obviously a NetBeans Platform application, otherwise why would I be blogging about it): (Read about how the above app was ported to the NetBeans Platform in a very interesting & detailed interview here.) I especially like the SwingX JXTaskPane in the left sidebar above, i.e., it creates a kind of Windows desktop experience, which is nice & useful for a lot of corporate software out there. So that...