Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

I've seen lots of questions and discussions recently about how to configure the installer generated by NetBeans IDE for NetBeans Platform applications. Rather than digging through build scripts and tweaking them, I think it makes more sense to go into the templates within the 'harness' folder of your platform and then... to tweak the files you find there. For example, getting from this default installer... ...to this one (notice a different icon in the top left, a different...

At this year's Jfokus in Stockholm I met lots of nice programmers interested in doing enterprise development on the Java desktop with the NetBeans Platform. So, for them, I've been investigating how to create support for runtime switching of locales from/to Swedish/English. There are a lot of resources on-line to help (such as this entry in Toni's blog), though there isn't one generic way to switch all different UI elements. Each area needs to be investigated and solved in...

Here is a root node with support for reordering its children: When the menu item shown above is clicked, the dialog below is shown, which works as you might expect: I did not define the dialog myself, it comes from the NetBeans Platform. To get that dialog to appear, you need to have a root node that has content as shown below: class RootNode extends AbstractNode { public RootNode(final CarList model) { super(Children.create(new CarChildFactory(model), true)); ...

The "org.openide.actions.NewAction" provides out-of-the-box UI for creating subnodes. Just add it to the list of Actions defined for your Node (i.e., its context actions) and you're good to go: @Overridepublic Action[] getActions(boolean context) { return new Action[]{SystemAction.get(NewAction.class)};} Read the sources of "NewAction" and you'll find it is a "NodeAction" that is enabled under a very specific condition: @Overrideprotected boolean enable(Node[]...

Aside from Jesse and Tim's attendance, the recent NetBeans Platform Certified Training in Boston was special in that the last 2 days (of 5 days) was spent with the students talking about their various Java applications and how those applications might be ported to the NetBeans Platform. One of the presentations was done by a group of developers from a big financial institution who had a JDesktopPane containing a number of JFrames. Each JFrame provides a different tool in the...

I recently noticed that there are currently 198 screenshots in the NetBeans Platform Showcase. These screenshots indicate that the NetBeans Platform is being used in every imaginable sector, from the aerospace/defence and enterprise/corporate world to the fields of scientific research, healthcare, finance, and software development. And there are, in fact, many more than 200, since many NetBeans Platform applications are of a confidential nature (e.g., most providers of...

Probably few people know what Tim Boudreau looks like, fewer still Jesse Glick. It took a NetBeans Platform Certified Training by VisiTrend (with and at Brandeis University in Boston) to make these photos possible. Since both Jesse and Tim live in the wider Boston area (Tim in the very wider area), they both came along to the recent NetBeans Platform training held there. Attendees ranged from developers at neuroscience-related companies to financial organizations. After 3...

Look at the Zoom buttons in the extreme left of the toolbar below. In the first screenshot, the selected window does not require zoomability, hence the buttons are disabled... ...while in this window, we imagine an image of some kind that should be zoomable, hence the Zoom buttons are enabled: Jesse created the above solution as part of VisiTrend's NDVis: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ndvis/develop Here's a step by step instruction to achieve the above. First, let's create an...

There's a new way of working with bundle keys in NetBeans Platform 7.0, as described in NbBundle.Messages. I've been converting tutorials to 7.0 (e.g., the NetBeans Plugin Quick Start and the NetBeans Platform Quick Start have already been done) and using this new @Messages annotation and really liking it. The current tutorial I am working on, the NetBeans Platform Paint Tutorial makes a lot of use of it too. For example, in the Paint Tutorial for 7.0, you have...