Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Good news for Mac users of NetBeans IDE. In 6.9, when you're using the Mac and go to Help | Keyboard Shortcuts Card, you will get a Mac-specific keyboard shortcut card: Hurray!

You want the source view of your multiview editor to display an XML file in the NetBeans XML Editor? Nothing simpler—take the following steps:Download and install this plugin from the Plugin Portal. Go to the New Project dialog, find the "Abc MultiView Sample" in Samples | NetBeans Modules and complete the wizard. In the Projects window, open "AbcResolver.xml" and replace its content with the following: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><!DOCTYPE MIME-resolver PUBLIC...

While in Oslo recently, Toni Epple and I interviewed Gunnar Reinseth from Exie, which is based in Oslo. Gunnar and his team are no strangers to the NetBeans Platform—they created Office LAF for the NetBeans Platform and integrated EMF into their application. We recorded the discussion we had together, i.e., Gunnar, Toni, and myself, and here it is in two parts, both are under 10 minutes each. The topics discussed include, of course, NetBeans Platform, but also modularity,...

The sample for developers creating multiview editors on the NetBeans Platform (described yesterday in this blog) is now slightly more extensive, since you can add new nodes in the visual view, which will then automatically be added to the source editor (as well as the visual editor, of course): The sample is available in the Plugin Portal and will work if you are using NetBeans IDE 6.9 Beta: http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal/faces/PluginDetailPage.jsp?pluginid=27988 You...

Been looking at multiview editors, since a few developers (Ajith Srikukan and Thusani Nagarathnam) have asked about this lately. I ended up with a small experimental starting point. When a new item is added in the text view of the editor below... ...a new node is added to the BeanTreeView in the visual view of the editor, alphabetically: Nice to have the synchronization working, at least from one side. Next I will try from the other side too. After that, use the XML editor....

Another small thing I learnt from Toni Epple last week—let's say you're localizing a JavaHelp set. Assuming your helpset is quite small, you can simply put the translated help files into the same folder as the originals, as shown below. Then, set this line in the "platform-private.properties" file of your module (so that it will not be committed to your repo): run.args.extra=--locale de:DE That's all, now you can run the module (or whole application) and during development...

Since I stated that yesterday's blog entry would be the final part in this series on creating context-sensitive capabilities for file-based nodes, the fact that the series continues today can only mean that... this is the epilogue! (In fact, it might be Part 1 of the epilogue.) The reason for yet another part in this series is that loosely coupled data sources could have varying ORM tools behind them. In other words, one module could provide entity classes that use iBatis to...

In this the final part of this ad-hoc series on context-sensitive actions for file-based nodes... we'll do something pretty radical—we'll use the loosely coupled ChildFactories from yesterday's blog entry to provide loosely coupled data sources. That's exactly what the Institute of Marine Research (IMR) in Bergen, Norway, needs. Look at the screenshots below, you see two nodes, each providing access to different data... in the same TopComponent. While I integrated with the...

Rather than finding a TopComponent for each Node (as done yesterday), let's share a single TopComponent between multiple Nodes. The benefit is that, well, you'll only have one TopComponent to maintain. You'll simply assign a different ChildFactory to the TopComponent's ExplorerManager, i.e., on the fly, programmatically, as and when needed. Above, the Node hierarchy in the Details view is built from a ChildFactory registered in the layer. Hence, when a module is added from...