Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Let's say you have an application on top of the NetBeans Platform. One of the application's modules does nothing more than wrap a 3rd party library. However, within that 3rd party library is a helpset that you'd like to integrate into your own application's helpset. How do you integrate that helpset, i.e., one that is within a 3rd party JAR, into your own application? You could, of course, simply manually copy the help files from the 3rd party helpset and paste them into one...

"Damit Service Provider einem System dynamisch und flexibel hinzugefügt werden können, also auch dann noch, wenn eine Anwendung bereits ausgeliefert wurde, und erst dann geladen werden, wenn sie auch wirklich benötigt werden, werden diese deklarativ, also über Konfigurationsdateien, registriert." The above sentence encapsulates the wonderfulness of the German language! What I absolutely love about it is the fact that its VERB is "registriert". :-) I.e., the very last word in...

Via Mark Stephens' conference trip report, I found out about the above Penguin webcam at the New England Aquarium. Pretty cool! In other news. Mark's colleague Mariusz has a great article about combining Flex with Java, where one of the tools used is NetBeans IDE 6.1. Click here for all the details.

There's been some discussion on the NetBeans Platform mailing list (dev AT openide DOT netbeans DOT org) about the two approaches to registering service providers. Because, there are two approaches that are quite distinct that achieve the same end result. So the question is: which one to use and why? And why are there two approaches to begin with? To recap, the two approaches are as follows: Create a file in META-INF/services named after the fully qualified name of the...

The always enthusiastic (and NetBeans Docs Coordinator and NetBeans Dream Team member) Varun Nischal wrote me a few days ago asking about NetBeans Platform slides he might be able to learn from in preparing for a presentation he'll be doing at Amity University, Noida, in India. I realized that we don't have a centralized location where anyone can go to download teaching materials for the NetBeans Platform! Sure, we have the NetBeans Platform Learning Trail and the NetBeans Pla...

The above is the cover of the book "Rich Client Programming: Plugging into the NetBeans Platform" translated into Chinese by Liang Ye. He reports that the book is currently at the printer, so it sounds like things are going to be moving very fast now with this translation! Click here to read an interview with Liang, where he explains the background of this translation project (and go here if you're a Chinese teacher of Java and are looking for some slides for your courses...

Here's Javadoc with UML diagrams for the Google Toolbar module from the NetBeans Plugin Quick Start: To let the IDE automatically generate UML diagrams into your NetBeans module's Javadoc, do this: Read this for background and to set up the required software. Add this to the module project's build.xml file: <target name="netbeans-extra" description="Generates UML-Javadoc"> <property file="nbproject/project.properties"/> <mkdir dir="${dist.javadoc.dir}"/> <javadoc...

Lloyd and I started doing recordings for the next NetBeans Podcast today. More will be done during the coming week (so there's still time to send your suggestions to nbpodcast AT netbeans DOT org), including, probably, an interview with one of the NetBeans Platform customers. We're aiming to release it on Monday, 8 September. One thing you'll hear is Jaroslav Tulach announcing the winner of the "Will Code HTML for Food" competition. And, of course, among many other things,...

I saw Maxim's announcement about a NetBeans plugin for his Swing Explorer and tried it. First I was unable to install his plugin. But then I checked out his sources and rebuilt the plugin and installed it and everything worked as expected. For the first time, I was able to jump to the source, from within the Swing Explorer, as below: And here's the new "Addition Trace" tab in action, where you can see every line of code that is executed, with hyperlinks that let you jump...