Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

My DZone colleague Meera Subbarao took the new Grails/Groovy support in NetBeans IDE for a spin, with great results. Part of her concluding remarks are: "If you are a Groovy or a Grails fan, download the latest version of NetBeans and give it a try. You can develop, test and run your Grails application without ever opening a command window." Click the pic below to read the whole story:

Here's how to get started with Grails in NetBeans IDE 6.5.Prepare the Environment Read the Grails Quick Start, which presents the scenario that we will reproduce in the sections that follow. Download and install the "Web & Java EE" distribution of NetBeans IDE 6.5 Milestone 1 or later. (Everything done below is done with the latest development build, which is probably the best thing to get for getting to know the IDE's Grails support, if you're okay with unexpected errors now...

By default, the Quick Search feature is hidden in NetBeans Platform applications. Below, I show how to enable it in the layer.xml file and also how to enable the web search provider (this provider searches Google and returns pages that match your search string), which is defined in the NetBeans sources but not declared by default in the NetBeans Platform: <folder name="QuickSearch"> <!-- Optionally, we've hidden the existing quick search providers: --> <file...

I noticed in recent builds that the appearance of the new 6.5 Quick Search feature has improved recently. It looks a lot better and provides more functionality. First, you can see in the final category below that there is a "..." elipsis if the list of results is longer than the length of the visible list: So you can click on that elipsis and see all the results. Also, if you're looking at the screenshot above and wondering: "He typed 'tip' but several of the results do NOT...

For a very long time, Jaroslav Tulach has been asking me to add links to documentation (blogs as well as tutorials) to the NetBeans API Javadoc. I always said I would do so but then ended up being too scared—it seemed strange to add additonal Javadoc comments to code that someone else had written and I thought that somehow the build would break if I did so. (And I was also concerned that the documentation in question might be wrong or misleading, while the fact that it was...

Another change, comparable to the registration of the action class within the layer.xml that I showed yesterday, is the way in which actions that are "always enabled" will be created & registered in 6.5. In 6.5, if you make this selection in the New Action wizard: ...everything in the wizard will be the same as it always was. I.e., in the next panel, you'll specify where the "always enabled" action should appear and then, in the panel that appears after that, you will specify...

Following on from Notes for NetBeans Platform 6.5 Milestone 1, let's look at some more and some slightly subtle changes in the upcoming 6.5 release, when creating new modules (i.e., plugins). I'm using a build from earlier today, you won't find much of what I describe here in earlier builds. So, first, as always, we start up the New Module wizard. Look, our first change. A checkbox allowing you to enable/disable creating of the layer.xml file, which solves the...

...please send your e-mail there again! Until a few minutes ago, the e-mail account wasn't working correctly, so that we never received any of your e-mails. (Which explains why "nobody solved the last NetBeans Puzzler".) Apologies for the inconvenience. Use that mail address for (1) sending answers to the NetBeans Puzzler of the Podcast and (2) sending ideas for people/topics you'd like to have addressed in future podcasts!

The first NetBeans podcast hosted by Lloyd and myself! NetBeans Podcast Episode #44 (31 min, size: 32.8 MB) 00:58 NetBeans 6.5 Milestone 1 10:15 NetCAT 6.5, introduced by project co-ordinator Jiri Kovalsky 14:37 Jaroslav Tulach's API Design Tip 17:53 Project of the Podcast: VisualVM, introduced by technical lead Tomas Hurka 26:30 Plugin of the podcast: Breadcrumb 28:25 NetBeans Puzzler Send the answer to the puzzler to: nbpodcast@netbeans.org by Thursday, 31 July 2008. If there are...