Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

One of my current favorite features in the IDE is the Web Service Registry: You can register web services there yourself and/or use the defaults provided by the IDE. Expand a node and you will end up with the specific method on the web service you'd like to invoke. Then you can drag that node into the Java editor. When you do so, all the background files are created (e.g., even including the file that will hold a registration key, if any, such as required by Yahoo, for...

Well, this may be the most exciting thing I have yet reported on in relation to the NetBeans Platform. Look at this screenshot: Above, an application on the NetBeans Platform is up and running. Below I added a new Action to a module in the above application. I.e., I used the new Action wizard, so that a new Java class was created, as well as being registered in the layer file. I then right-clicked the module and chose "Reload in Target Platform": The application was still...

Quite early in every NetBeans Platform Certified Training, students are told: "But there's no law saying your NetBeans Platform application must have a desktop GUI. In fact, it could be the basis of a command line tool, which would have no GUI, or a web application, which would have a web frontend." Jaroslav Tulach's "DVB Central" is one example of a modular command line tool. Today, I created another one. With my command line tool, you can type this on the command line: shpars...

In the recent training in Stellenbosch, we managed to include the NetBeans Platform UndoRedo support in an application we worked on, as described in this tutorial. However, when we looked at the Visual Library, the question was raised: "How would UndoRedo work in a Visual Library scene?" As you can see below, I managed to get it working. I.e., when a widget is moved, the Undo action is enabled. When the Undo action is invoked, the widget is returned to where it was prior to...

I spent some time today creating the select/move modes that you see in the bottom left of the screenshot below: The two buttons in the bottom left, above, how are they created? The underlying approach is to use Scene.setActiveTool. However, in this case we're not using a right-click popup menu to select the mode because that menu is used to create the widgets above. Instead, the modes are defined in Action classes, registered in the layer. So, we have two Actions in the...

It turns out that not just UNESCO, but also the UNHCR is working with the NetBeans Platform. I've known this for a while, because I've been in touch with Stanyslas Tamayo from the UNHCR , who's been asking questions off and on for some time already. Then Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine mentioned the UNHCR project in his recent trip report from the jCertif conference in Congo: "Stanyslas from Kinshasa presented the NetBeans Platform for building rich applications and in particular...

Ernest Lotter from the ISSI team in Stellenbosch suggested that "Lookups.forPath" (and other code that looks into the filesystem) should be supported via code completion. Here's a start, on the dot prior to "forPath", when an item is selected, it is added between the quotation marks: To do: Fix it so that the code completion appears between the quotation marks within the braces, instead of on the dot. (Does anyone know how I should do that?) Extend it so that when the user...

Now here's a pretty cool piece of code. Let's imagine you're populating a node hierarchy from a database. In addition, you want to populate the same node hierarchy from the filesystem because you're using @ConvertAsJavaBeanto serialize a new business object whenever the user steps through a wizard to create a new customer. At that point, i.e., when Finish is clicked, the .settings file is created in the userdir because maybe the user doesn't want to save the new object as...

Here's a video of Ernest Lötter from ISS International (world leader in microseismological services and software for monitoring of mines) in Stellenbosch, sharing some info about the the NetBeans Platform Visual Library. However, you need to learn Afrikaans first to understand it! In fact, this is (unless I am mistaken) the first screencast about the NetBeans Platform that is in Afrikaans! (German and Dutch speakers would probably understand the screencast though.) The whole...