Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Let's say you're creating a customer application where you have different toolbar buttons and menu items that need to be enabled depending on various states of the underlying customer object. For example, let's say you're analyzing resellers of a product. You're creating an application that includes handling responses to the state of what a reseller has done with the product you've sold them. So, one state may be "the reseller has paid", another state may be "the reseller has...

Let's say you need a (1) menu item in the right-click popup menu of a node and a (2) toolbar button in the main toolbar to be enabled/disabled based on the current state of an object. Below is a case in point. We have a vehicle console that has an "Install Vehicle" action. That action applies to the underlying "Vehicle" object, which is wrapped in a BeanNode, "VehicleNode". The "Vehicle" object has two booleans, among other things. The booleans, "standby" and "available",...

Well, JavaOne is winding down and so it's time to throw out my pearls of wisdom, etc. The entire week, I've been very heavily focused on the NetBeans Platform to the exclusion of everything else, which is particularly a pity in the direction of the Groovy ecosystem. I.e., unfortunately, I didn't go to any of the sessions relating to Groovy/Grails/Griffon. I believe Groovy is Java's natural scripting language and, since I'm interested in Java and also in expressiveness, I...

Post mortem analysis of performance problems... via a timeline in the NetBeans Profiler: Read all about it.

A task I've set for myself is to provide documentation for the development environment around the NetBeans APIs, i.e., documentation relating to testing, debugging, profiling, and continuous builds. As I work on these very important and underdocumented aspects, I'm learning a lot. While writing the NetBeans Platform Testing Tutorial, I learned that unit testing, functional testing, and code measurement support is built INTO the NetBeans Platform build harness, meaning that...

Friends of the NetBeans Platform have the following topics to choose from during JavaOne: Monday: 4:00PM (Rikard Thulin)Session: Building Software with Rich Client Platforms (NetBeans RCP and Eclipse RCP)This session will discuss the fundamental ideas and technologies behind the two leading Rich Client Platforms: NetBeans RCP and Eclipse RCP. Building a user interface that is nontrivial requires a lot of UI plumbing. Using an RCP enables you to focus on implementing real...

Found this track backed in my blog today: Great tips are provided in the article above for incorporating an open source approach: Make the source available throughout the organisation Extend the family of committers Open up the documentation Everyone submits bugs/features Create mailing lists Sometimes I wish more of the above were to be REALLY implemented within open source projects! Read the whole article here: From Bizarre to Bazaar – Lessons Corporates Can Learn From...

Here's a fantastic & unique resource for learning how to use the NetBeans Platform: 4th Team Challenge Submission: Property Management System by Joseph & David My understanding of the above link is that Joseph and David (who I met in London recently) entered a competition for learning some IT related technology within 1 month. And they did learn the NetBeans Platform in a month... and they WON the competition. Click the above link and learn a LOT about learning how to use the...

Here's a simple example for an OutlineView, following a request on the dev mailing list.We start by creating a Customer object: public class Customer { String name; String city; int age; boolean married;} Next, in the above class, create getters and setters for all the fields. Now set a dependency on the "Nodes API", the "ETable and Outline", and the "Explorer & Property Sheet API". Let's now create a Node that will wrap the above Customer object: public class...