Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Edvin Syse from Norway is porting a CMS to the NetBeans Platform. So I thought I'd experiment with his usecase, which includes HTML content that is not in an actual HTML file. Instead, the HTML content is defined in a string within the domain object. Not really complete yet, but this is what I have so far: One problem is that I haven't integrated the NetBeans HTML Editor yet, so (as reported yesterday) a few features are missing at the moment, possibly because I'm not using...

Again, as yesterday, without code completion, but helpful nonetheless, again for business applications where the end user might like to do a bit of HTML editing while doing other things in the application: The nice thing is that, simply by setting the content type of the second JEditorPane to text/x-html, I can set the second JEditorPane to the content of the first, when the Evaluate button is clicked. That's all the the Evaluate button does! Aside from code completion, I...

Even when you're not creating some kind of IDE, you might still have technical end users in mind. For this kind of user, it might be handy if you'd integrate a small scripting editor into your application, as I've done here for Groovy: The editor area above is a JEditorPane. In the constructor of the TopComponent is this code: EditorKit kit = CloneableEditorSupport.getEditorKit("text/x-groovy");editorPane.setEditorKit(kit);FileObject fob;try { //Create a file in memory: ...

On the dev mailing list, Ruben Laguna figured out how to remove the document window in a NetBeans Platform application, while also displaying two modes split vertically. I played around with his solution today and I now have an application consisting of 4 modules (master, detail, API, and branding), with this result: The interesting point about the above screenshot is that there's no document window (compare that to the screenshot of the Funambol Admin Tool, in yesterday's...

What does the NetBeans Platform have to offer in an increasingly mobile-driven world? Funambol provides mobile cloud synch for phones and connected devices. The focus of this organization is mobile phones. Despite that, the NetBeans Platform, a solution for the desktop, fits in perfectly. Why? Because, as I discovered recently while in Ikea, a lot of configuration and administration tasks will always take place on the desktop. (Such as choosing and laying out a kitchen, which...

When learning a new thing, one way to cross the hurdles thrown up by new concepts is to relate them to concepts you already know. The NetBeans Platform is broad and daunting at first, though much less so after you spend some time studying the Essential NetBeans Platform Refcard. Next, let's start relating some of the key terms, concepts, and API constructs to some concepts that we're undoubtedly familiar with, primarily, MVC. Why MVC, in particular? Because that's a pattern...

Let's say we have a general TopComponent, which we want to share between multiple different modules. I.e., each module will provide its own Action. When the Action is invoked, e.g., from a menu item, a JPanel provided by the module that provides the Action will be added to the TopComponent, once the previous content in the TopComponent has been removed. Creating a generic Action providing the above functionality, following Jesse's corrections in the comment to yesterday's...

When you use the Window wizard in the IDE to create a new TopComponent, you'll find an Action that looks something like this, registered in your layer.xml file, without any Java source file for the Action class being created in your module: <folder name="Actions"> <folder name="Window"> <file name="org-netbeans-feedreader-FeedAction.instance"> <attr name="instanceCreate" methodvalue="org.openide.windows.TopComponent.openAction"/> <attr...

I'm working on a branch to provide better layer documentation. This is the official place for the layer documentation, available from the NetBeans Javadoc landing page: http://bits.netbeans.org/dev/javadoc/layers.html And here's my version, constantly in flux, note that I am focusing on good descriptions and examples (and explanations of those examples). Check back to this link every few days and you'll start noticing improvements, hopefully: http://deadlock.netbeans.org/hudson/...