Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

If I were someone evaluating the existing Swing desktop frameworks, I wouldn't hesitate to choose the NetBeans Platform over Griffon or Spring RCP—for one very specific reason: any application built atop the NetBeans Platform is inherently extensible. John O'Conner's definition of extensibility applies here: "An extensible application is one that you can extend easily without modifying its original code base." In this sense, a plugin is not what Grails understands a plugin to...

The NetBeans Platform Screenshots page has been updated! There are several new screenshots of cool existing NetBeans Platform applications that are now listed there for the first time: These are all applications that have been created on top of the NetBeans Platform, the modular Swing application framework that is the basis of NetBeans IDE, among many other applications, such as the above. For more information on the above applications, see the NetBeans Platform Screenshots pa...

The title of this blog entry is meaningless... except... if you want to use Groovy Web Services with JDK 6.x (instead of JDK 5.x). I wrote about the embarrassingly easy web services in Groovy before and then today ran into the error that starts with this line: org.apache.cxf.endpoint.dynamic.DynamicClientFactory outputDebug Yes, it is an illuminating start to a long stack trace, isn't it? (That's why I put it in the title of this blog entry, hoping to draw frustrated...

Another small experiment with Griffon, but this time there's a problem, one that I've had a couple of times. First, the code. Here's the model: import groovy.beans.Bindableclass App1Model { @Bindable String name = "James"} Here's the controller: class App1Controller { def model def view def saveName = { evt -> model.name = view.nameField.text }} Here's the view: build(App1Actions)application(title: 'App1', size:[320,480], location:[50,50], pack:true,...

Cay Horstmann's blog today inspired me to try the draggable applet scenario again. JDK 6 Update 10 holds that promise. However, I've never managed to get it to work before on Ubuntu (or anywhere else, but I only use Ubuntu so that's all that matters at the moment). Cay's keymap tip was one step I never knew about. Then I discovered a world of pain (conflicting JDKs, conflicting Java plugins, a myriad of small files that need to be tweaked, half a freakish hour when no...

It seems to me that Griffon (brand new Groovy-based Swing MVC-structured framework) has identified the dark underbelly of the Java desktop world—there are no guidelines for how an application's sources should be structured. Two of the bloggers I read today on the excellent http://groovyblogs.org confirm this: "Generally, I find the code very manageable, I look at xyzController in the controllers folder, I know its views will be in a directory xyz under views. Domain objects...

I created the whole NetBeans API Javadoc viewer described in Flying with Griffon in NetBeans IDE 6.5 (Dev), using my tweaked Grails modules. The Swing application and applet are created via the same "griffon run-app" process, with this result: However, the application (i.e., Swing application, applet, and JNLP) could have been created without NetBeans IDE, of course. Simply follow the steps described there from a command prompt, with a text pad, and you'll end up with the...

New project template that runs "griffon create-app" and automatically opens the newly created application in the IDE. The newly created application is based on the brand new Grails-based Groovy-Swing framework called Griffon: For future reference, here's notes on how to convert Grails support to Griffon support, which I will do once Grails support has stabilized: hg clone http://hg.netbeans.org/main nb_all cd nb_all Then search in the Groovy/Grails modules for...

Over time, there have been many changes on the NetBeans Platform site, i.e., http://platform.netbeans.org/. And there are a few more coming still, but most of the major changes have now been realized. One cool new thing is that there's a vertical scrolling list for news items (since the last few days) relating to the NetBeans Platform, which currently looks as follows: The vertical scrollbar is new, meaning that the list of new items can pretty much be endless, and...