Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

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...

Very funny thing I learned from Toni Epple today: import org.openide.awt.ActionID;import org.openide.awt.ActionReference;import org.openide.awt.ActionRegistration;public class MyUtilities { @ActionRegistration( displayName = "#CTL_CopyAll", iconBase="org/my/utilities/copyall.jpg") @ActionID(category = "Edit", id = "copyAll") @ActionReference(path="Menu/Edit", position=1150) public static final String ACTION_MAP_COPYALL = "copy-all";} What...

Funny NetBeans IDE experiment: Like this: public class Installer extends ModuleInstall { @Override public void restored() { WindowManager.getDefault().invokeWhenUIReady(new Runnable() { @Override public void run() { TopComponent tc = WindowManager.getDefault().findTopComponent("projectTabLogical_tc"); ExplorerManager.Provider ep = (ExplorerManager.Provider) tc; final ExplorerManager em =...

I've seen some questions around the XML MultiView API and so recreated and then uploaded most of the sample I blogged about here in 2007. The result is as follows, though currently nothing happens when you click the LinkButtons: Also note that in 7.1, there'll be an enhanced MultiView Core API, together with support in the IDE when creating new file types, as described here, though you will not be using the XML MultiView API in that case, which means no SectionPanels, etc,...

Sometimes its handy to have a database embedded within an application. It means that your users don't need to install any database software themselves. Saves a lot of hassle all round. Sometime ago my colleague Ashwin Rao put together these instructions, which extend the NetBeans Platform CRUD Tutorial such that an embedded database is used rather than an external one. There've been some questions around that scenario recently, so I uploaded the sources of the embedded database...

Bruce Schubert provided a patch for the PinkMatter Ribbon toolbar, which decreases the height of the toolbar (real estate is important in many NetBeans Platform applications), by changing the application menu and removing the task bar. (Part 1 describes different approaces to the same end.) By default, this is what the PinkMatter Ribbon toolbar looks like: ...and, with Bruce's changes, this is what it can look like instead: You end up saving some space, while still having the...

Dunder Mifflin and any other organization out there can quite easily brand the background of their application on the NetBeans Platform, with this result: To get to the above point, read my earlier blog entry "FireFox Personas for the NetBeans Platform" and if you don't understand it, check out the sources of a module I created today that, once you add it to any NetBeans Platform application, will brand it for Dunder Mifflin, just like the above: http://java.net/projects/nb-api-...

Let's add a new item in the left sidebar of a Hippo application... for our site's agenda items. It's slightly tricky since you don't simply want to add a new link to a page. Instead, you want to add new metadata and content into the JSR 283 repo that is beneath Hippo. So, there's the default website that the Hippo Maven archetype gives you (the "site" module): ...and what we want to achieve in this blog entry is to have a new item "agenda" right below "news": This is how to...

Let's say you have a JPanel that you'd like to integrate into the NetBeans Platform toolbar. As an example, we imagine that this is the JPanel: public class NextPrevJPanel extends JPanel { JButton nextButton = new JButton(); JButton prevButton = new JButton(); public NextPrevJPanel() { setLayout(new BoxLayout(this, BoxLayout.X_AXIS)); prevButton.setIcon(new ImageIcon(getClass().getResource("prev.png"))); nextButton.setIcon(new...