Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Twitter is just about the best thing to have happened in the world of social media. Only those who don't use it would be able to come close to disagreeing with that statement. :-) In light of that, I've started a new thing called "#nbtwip": I'm hoping it will become a gathering point for quick tips and tricks involving NetBeans IDE, as well as the NetBeans Platform. The trick to creating an effective #nbtwip is to remember that the IDE is many things to many people. I.e., you...

The next step in the Mona Lisa puzzle is to let the user set the image that should form the basis of the puzzle. Via a button in the global toolbar, this wizard is displayed: There's a complete Wizard framework that is part of the NetBeans Platform. It really lets you focus on your domain logic, without needing to think too much about the logic needed for the wizard to work. So, in the above case, I used the Wizard wizard in NetBeans IDE to create a wizard skeleton, added my...

The next part of the puzzle is... to let the user know when a dropped piece is correctly placed. So, below, you can see that the most recent drop was good and that the total of correctly dropped pieces is 3: How to do this? Well, first of all, we need to have access to the logical objects represented by the PuzzleWidgets. After all, currently, as David Kaspar explained to me, there are 37 widgets in the PuzzleScene: 1x LayerWidget 12x PuzzleWidget:IconNodeWidget Each...

If Mona Lisa was a puzzle... ...this would define her: class PuzzleScene extends ObjectScene { public PuzzleScene() { LayerWidget layerWidget = new LayerWidget(this); ImageIcon mona = ImageUtilities.loadImageIcon("org/mona/puzzle/board/puzzle.jpg", true); Image source = mona.getImage(); int width = mona.getIconWidth(); int height = mona.getIconHeight(); Random generator = new Random(); for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++) { ...

Surely the image below lies somewhere between a Scottish kilt and a tapestry, on the one hand, and a cross between futurism and cubism, on the other? Either way, it's really artistic and somehow pleasing to look at. And it comes from the Ukraine and you can read more about it here, in a freshly published article highlighting yet another NetBeans Platform application. Great job, Dmitry Marienko (and team)!

Not only Jurgen's community translation (from German to English) will be appearing in the coming period... also Heiko's Czech translation (again, thanks to the NetBeans Platform community) is set to be released: The translation effort was led by Miloš Šilhánek, with a community-based translation team, Jaroslav Tulach also being involved and providing a foreword. The subtitle, in English, is "Detailed Programmer's Guide". The book is planned to be released in July and can be...

I used this tutorial to create a simple 1:n model in EMF: I exported the model to a JAR file, which had manifest entries indicating I now had an OSGi bundle. I could simply use that JAR as a JAR in my NetBeans Platform application. However, I'd like an OSGi container to manage my bundle, i.e., make sure that the dependencies set in the manifest are satisfied. Therefore, I created a NetBeans Platform application on top of Equinox, thanks to the sample application in NetBeans...

Integration of REST resources into NetBeans Platform applications is trivial in 6.9—there's a new wizard in NetBeans IDE that lets you select a REST resource in the IDE: Once selected above, lots of code is generated for making the connection to your REST resource, together with a client stub for further development in your application. I didn't need to do much work to integrate the Yahoo news service into a small application, as can be seen below (click to enlarge): In the...

When we talk, during the NetBeans Platform Certified Training, about the autoupdate feature of the NetBeans Platform, almost without fail someone asks: "Can I also push features, silently, to the end users of my application?" The scenario is that you have end users who are either (1) not very technical or (2) too busy to use the Plugin Manager, yet you need to distribute new features to them anyway. Or maybe the user has logged in or has paid a special fee for the...