Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Somehow "Assemble the Social Web with zembly" landed on my desk about a week ago. The book is written by "award-winning authors" Gail & Paul Anderson, which entails that the content is well written & well constructed, together with two of the top Sun engineers in the web service space, Todd Fast & Chris Webster, who're also behind "zembly" itself, implying that the conceptual info & actual code is correct. Sounds like a killer team to me. I've blogged about zembly before (her...

Yesterday I published an article about integrating JavaFX with the NetBeans Platform: http://netbeans.dzone.com/news/animated-javafx-meets-netbeans I think there are many use cases where using JavaFX on the NetBeans Platform would make sense, because it simplifies aspects of Swing coding. What I'm wondering is, maybe it would be cool to clarify exactly how the NetBeans Visual Library differs from JavaFX. Obviously there are differences, but what are they concretely? E.g., some...

I learned a bunch of interesting things today. It all started when I went back to the idea of documenting how I made the plugin that I'm using in the Top 10 NetBeans APIs series, for displaying my slides within NetBeans IDE. The problem is that I had lost my sources (also the binary, I think). But I needed to rewrite it anyway because I had hard coded the slides into the module. So now, the slides are read from the layer.xml file! All one needs to do is (1) install my plugin,...

Great movie.

I hailed 2009 as the NetBeans Platform's "Year of Documented Business Scenarios", here in December last year. The related issue is here (feel free to hop into that issue and add your wisdom to it): http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=146402 Well, I'm happy to report quite some progress. I started a series on NetBeans Zone a few days ago that you should definitely read closely if you're interested in a typical business case involving JPA on the backend with NetBeans...

It was not until yesterday, after having spent a month in Alexandria, Egypt, that I remembered the high school I went to in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, was called 'Alexandria Boys High School' (which at the time was for white boys only, both of which are no longer true). But the school was named after some princess while Alex in Egypt is named after Alexander the Great, who founded it. Unless I miss my early morning plane, I'll be back in Prague during the weekend. Aside...

One of the top 10 features of Egypt is, of course, the shisha (more specifically, the contents thereof). Here is me last night outside a cafe in Cairo with Hamada, Amr, and Khaled, applying the default shisha usecase: The discussion obviously turned to the need for tight integration between shisha and NetBeans IDE. Initial brainstorms around powering NetBeans IDE via a shisha were briefly assessed and then rejected as brilliant but impractical. Then, as if out of thin air,...

Today was day two of a three day NetBeans Platform Training in Cairo. The training is being held at the University of Cairo, but many of the students are from many other places—and most are either from software companies creating desktop applications or are teachers from universities and colleges. The course was organized via the Egyptian JUG, where you can find more pics (here). Here's a pic of part of the group at the end of the 1st day: The program of the course is as...

Jeff Friesen (whose great book "Beginning Java SE 6 Platform: From Novice to Professional" I reviewed here on Javalobby) has written a great article, freshly published in JavaWorld: The last sections of the article show you how to create a NetBeans plugin from scratch. These sections are prefaced by these words, which I thought were quite nice:"After trying out the previously discussed NetBeans plugins and others that you download from the NetBeans Plugins Portal,...