Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

A first (and potentially wrong) experiment with the new 6.8 @ConvertAsJavaBean annotation. I annotate my business object ("CountryBean", which has a name property to hold the name of the country and a food property to hold the country's national food, e.g., "Germany/sauerkraut") with the new annotation: import org.netbeans.api.settings.ConvertAsJavaBean;@ConvertAsJavaBeanpublic class CountryBean { String name; String food; public String getFood() {return food;} ...

I attended a meeting yesterday about Java EE 6 features in the upcoming NetBeans IDE 6.8. Some notes: The main emphasis is on the 'Web Application' project type, since EJBs can now also be created within web applications. The thinking is that other web-related project types, for EJB modules, app clients, and Java EE applications will be less used from NetBeans IDE 6.8 onwards. GlassFish v3 is the only server currently supporting Java EE 6. It is based on OSGi and is therefore...

When you create actions for a node (such as when you want to display the node in an explorer view), one way of doing so is like this, within your DataNode extension class: @Overridepublic Action[] getActions(boolean context) { Action[] result = new Action[]{ new MyAction(), }; return result;} However, it is much smarter to register your actions in the System FileSystem (via the module's layer.xml file). (You do this in the "Loaders" folder, within the...

The question of the day comes from Tom Wheeler, as well as others in the past, in particular Klaus Martinschitz (here): "How do I save a project?" The same question can be asked in other ways too: "What does 'ProjectState' do?" and "How does ProjectFactory.saveProject" work? Note: If the above paragraph is meaningless to you, then you should probably forget about reading the rest of this blog entry, lest you get very confused. The two classes that are important in this context...

Overview of items/lists/tables for upcoming NetBeans Platform Refcard on DZone (in random/brainstorm order): General Topics What the base NetBeans Platform consists of What each module is used for What's new in the current release of NetBeans Platform Getting Started in 5 Steps Recently deprecated classes and idioms (here) Old vs. new ways of doing things Top 10 questions asked on the mailing list "Gotchas", e.g., palette only shows for TopComponent in 'editor' mode, need to...

When Toni Epple and I were at Skyguide in Geneva last week, we were shown SEVERAL applications that the Skyguide developers want to port to the NetBeans Platform. Fortunately, one of these is... an open source application! It is called Scrinch, a scrum tool that the Skyguide developers use internally for managing their projects. Get the sources here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/scrinch/ And you can start the application via web start after going to this page: http://scrinch....

X3D-Edit, by Don Brutzman, et al, from the Naval PostGraduate School in Monterey, California, is a tool for editing, authoring, and validating X3D scenes. X3D-Edit is written on top of the NetBeans Platform. Here's a screenshot (click to enlarge it): The related thesis can be found here (PDF). It's very interesting to browse the X3D-Edit site... for example, you find out about a number of interesting plugins specifically made for this application, as well as other generic...

AgentSpotter is a multi-agent system (MAS) profiler & visualizer, created by Dinh Doan Van Bien for a Masters thesis at University College, Dublin. It is created on top of the NetBeans Platform, just like all these applications. Here's one screenshot (click to enlarge it): On the website linked above, one reads: "There are gazillions of MAS visualisation tools out there but AgentSpotter is the first to display performance data: flat profiles, call graphs, space-time diagram....

Toni and I are in Geneva, Switzerland, giving a NetBeans Platform Certified Training to Skyguide (responsible for software for Swiss air traffic control). One of the applications they're considering porting to the NetBeans Platform interacts via JMX. So, to see how that would work on the NetBeans Platform, I created a small NetBeans Platform application that monitors the Anagram Game. Here's the JMX info in VisualVM: And here it is displayed in my NetBeans Platform JMX client: W...