Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

The year is drawing to a close and plans for the coming year are being drafted. Personally, my main focus in the coming year in relation to the NetBeans Platform will be—documenting business scenarios for the NetBeans Platform. Up to this point, I've mainly been focused on writing tutorials that cover the main NetBeans APIs and, to a greater or lesser extent, a lot of that is complete, between the NetBeans Platform Tutorials and the NetBeans Developer FAQ, most things have at...

If you're wondering how/where to commit code to the NetBeans project, especially when you're first getting started doing so, go here. That will bring you to NetBeans Issuezilla, in a query for the whiteboard status "request_for_contribution": NetBeans engineers use that whiteboard status to indicate that the issue is one that they think would be especially useful for external contributors. So, why not you?

One thing I'm meant to be working on is writing a tutorial for creating a CRUD application on the NetBeans Platform. The related issue and interesting documentation relating to this point can be found in the issue: http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=146402 And here's where things are right now: It is a prototype that uses the Database Explorer API to display information in a NetBeans Explorer View via the Nodes API. It also prints column names to the Output...

...if so, I'd like to know: Go here and download the ZIP file that you find there (updated 5 seconds ago): http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal/faces/PluginDetailPage.jsp?pluginid=3586 Use the NetBeans Plugin Manager to install the 3 NBMs that are contained within that ZIP file. Create a new web application and, in the final panel, click the Wicket checkbox: Click Finish and then you'll have a completely new & fresh Wicket application, with all its standard bells &...

Let's say your application incorporates a module's helpset that has CSS references in each of its help topics such as this: <link rel="stylesheet" href="nbdocs://org.netbeans.modules.usersguide/org/netbeans/modules/usersguide/ide.css" type="text/css"> I believe, but could be wrong, that the above is not very good. Why? Because the CSS reference is to a DIFFERENT module, so that the module that includes the reference above is not self-contained. Instead of that, it depends on...

I found some code by Tim Boudreau on-line, which changes the tabbed windows in the IDE to toolbars: It works perfectly. Just click a different toolbar and a different window is opened, in the case of Projects/Files/Services. Compare that to the default, where you have tabs instead: It's not very easy to do something like this. In this case, the class that did the trick extended AbstractTabDisplayerUI. It would be cool if somehow something like that could be done to add new...

Slovak Java Day was today in Bratislava. Vaclav Pech from IntelliJ did a presentation and then me on NetBeans IDE. The audience determined who got the bottle of wine and it was a tie, more or less, so we ended up "fighting" over it: It was a great day, well organized, and my secret agenda of meeting people who could end up getting the NetBeans Platform training injected into them... worked out pretty well.

Creating a new toolbar for NetBeans IDE is now easy in 6.5. Just use the New Action wizard, which gives you an "ActionListener", and then replace the "ActionListener" implementation with a "Presenter.Toolbar", as shown here: package org.demo.toolbar;import java.awt.Component;import org.openide.util.actions.Presenter;public final class SomeAction implements Presenter.Toolbar { //Here's where you put your panel into the toolbar area: @Override public Component...

In 6.5, when you create an "Always Enabled" action, the "New Action" wizard gives you this Java code: package org.demo.module;import java.awt.event.ActionEvent;import java.awt.event.ActionListener;public final class SomeAction implements ActionListener { public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { // TODO implement action body }} Very nice... because you're using plain old Java code. The ActionListener is one of the JDK's classes, unlike the Action classes that...