Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

In the last two days, you have read in this blog how to replace the default menu bar from the NetBeans Platform with your own custom menu bar. The reason for doing so was, initially, to display a corporate image. So, what about the NetBeans Platform toolbar? How would one provide a custom toolbar that replaces the one provided by the NetBeans Platform? By the way, that's exactly what someone named Matt asked at the end of the first of the two blog entries on menu bar...

Yesterday you saw how to provide a highly customized menu bar in a NetBeans Platform application. Let's now take it a few steps further. We imagine that our requirements have changed, we now need to provide a Login feature from our menu bar and we need the menus to resemble hyperlinks, both in terms of appearance and in terms of behavior. In the end, we'll have a menu bar that looks like this: Indeed, our application is going to pick up a few idioms from the web! To show some...

Today let's create a highly customized menu bar in our NetBeans Platform application: What's special in the above screenshot is that the menu bar has an image, the menu items are set to the right, and the toolbar is gone. That's all. But the effect is quite nice and professional for corporate applications. Get to the above point as follows: The key to everything is "netbeans.winsys.menu_bar.path"  which is a NetBeans property pointing to a folder in the central registry where a...

Trying to get Hippo deployed to GlassFish? Today I discovered a simple trick. Here's the proof that it works: The above are deployed from within the IDE. Deploying from within the GlassFish Admin Console, the names are what I would expect, so something needs to be configured for my projects so the display names are better when deployed from the IDE: Above, you see a Hippo Site and a Hippo CMS app deployed to GlassFish. I managed to do this by looking at how Tomcat is supported...

Use this to deploy your Hippo project: -P cargo.run -Dhippoecm.export.dir=/home/geertjan/now/content/src/main/resources Now, when you make changes to your document types and/or create document types, those changes will automatically be saved into the "content" project (i.e., the definition of the bootstrap content of your Hippo application) in your Hippo application, which above is found in "/home/geertjan/now": Not only will those additions/changes be persisted into...

Space is of the essence in the main window of the IDE [or any other NetBeans Platform application, since this plugin can be installed anywhere], so I've added a feature to the Quick Browser (currently at version 1.6) for enabling/disabling truncated display texts. As you can see, below, by truncating (by default) the display texts, more items can fit into the viewable area of the Quick Browser, while the status bar displays the whole display text anyway: For the same reason,...

The next handy feature I'm working on is integrating a pic browser into theQuick Browser. Of course, to create a thumbnail for each image identified in a folder is expensive and so the Slowness Detector (read all about that cool feature here) kicks into action: And that brings me to something I've never been able to figure out: what is the correct way to integrate the Progress Bar into a ChildFactory? I.e., when the nodes are created, I'd like to show the progress bar.Does...

Tired, like me, of needing to go to File | Open Project to open projects? And tired of the fact that you can't, at least not easily, open files outside of projects? The Favorites window offers some respite, but the Quick Browser in the right of the screenshot below is much better and simpler and more intuitive to use, since it is integrated into the main window and, well, it's really addictive: Just scroll through the items in the list on the right, click on an item to go a...

In JGridView (Part 2), I showed how to integrate a picture viewer based on the JGrid by Hendrik Ebbers into a NetBeans Platform application. Today I realized (thanks to Nicklas and Eric from Artificial Solutions in Stockholm) that there was something special about that integration. The key to the integration is this Node: private class PicNode extends BeanNode { public PicNode(PicViewerObject key) throws IntrospectionException { super(key, Children.LEAF,...