Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

The question of the day comes from Diane Kramer from VisiTrend in Boston: "I don't understand how to create a properties file (where do I put it?) that can be read when the program first starts up." The reason Diane wants to do this is that she's working on a database-oriented application for neuroscientists where the database settings need to be provided externally. I.e., there should be a file that the neuroscientists can get to very easily (so, not somewherewithin a user...

BEIJING, May 13, 2011 (SinoCast Daily Business Beat via COMTEX) -- China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC in short 601857)) officially released its new logging software CIFLOG as a symbolic achievement of oil & gas exploration key projects in Beijing. CIFLog, the first 3rd-generation logging process & interpretation system based on Java-NetBeans leading computer technology in the world, is the first such system able to run effectively under three majoroperating systems...

There's a cool new (?) way of Java development that I've been learning about in the past weeks while not being able to blog. The approach is generically referred to as "capabilities" in the context of NetBeans Platform applications, via the Lookup concept. Another way to understand the idea is to look at it from the point of view of the problem it tries to solve. Often, you find that you have your data access code embedded within your user interface. For example, within a...

Back in the land of blogging at last! The migration from blogs.sun.com to blogs.oracle.com seems to have worked for me at last. Thanks to the various Oracle staff involved in this process. I have a big backlog of NetBeans topics to blog about, so stay tuned.

In contrast to Ernest's excellent instructions, these below assume that (1) you are creating your installer on Windows and (2) you'd like your installer to be used on Windows only. Hence, these instructions are more limited, but also simpler, focusing purely on the Windows scenario.Go to your JDK installation and copy the JRE somewhere else, separately (e.g, "C:\\Program Files\\Java\\jre"), so you don't end up messing up the JDK you're actually using to run, for...

Derek, who I suspect of being Derek Witt from the Jewelry Customer Manager on the NetBeans Platform, recently left a comment in this blog about the NetBeans Installer framework (NBI): "I would like to use NBI, but we need to have our application install in C:\\Documents and Settings\\user\\Application Data\\Custom App instead of C:\\Program Files\\Custom App. If I could figure out how to change the default installation directory and not allow them to change it, that...

When you're generating installers for your NetBeans Platform application in the IDE, it helps to be able to run the generated installer right inside the IDE. I.e., I want to be able to right-click the generated installer and choose "Run" and then the installer starts. However, the IDE does not recognize my installer file type (which, since I am on Windows, is an ".exe" file). So here's how to run ".exe" files from within the IDE (or any other NetBeans Platform application)....

In part 1 I showed how to get started creating a runtime language switcher in your NetBeans Platform application so that the end user can (without a restart) switch from one human language to another, such as from English to Swedish and back. A starting point is to download the community translated version of NetBeans IDE. I.e., go to the NetBeans download page, choose the human language you're interested in from the "IDE Language" drop-down and then download the IDE. Two...

Together with NetBeans IDE 7, the latest & greatest release of the world's only modular Swing application framework, the NetBeans Platform, has also been pushed out the door. The release notes can be found here. I asked the engineers working on the NetBeans Platform for the new features considered most significant. The list that resulted, a subset of the link above, is as follows: @Messages. Use the @Messages annotation and you'll not need to work with bundle files anymore....