Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

The Options Dialog and SPI is nothing less than a complete framework for providing your user with a dialog for customizing the application you've created for them. As such, it gives you a complete dialog, i.e., the Options window, into which you can plug additional JPanels and then use the NbPreferences API to let the user set/store/retrieve the customizations you've let them set in the JPanels. The good news is that this framework will be improved in three significant...

I've been looking at recent builds for a few weeks, making changes to the JavaHelp in the NetBeans Platform area. Here are my notes, which will be formalized later so currently is just a draft: API Changes: See NetBeans API Changes Since Last Release. Highlights: New Code Generator SPI User can drop text into palette Loaders are registered in layer No need for DataLoaders anymore New OutlineView component replaces TreeTableView component New resource bundle properties for window...

Typhoon Frank hit Manila during the 2nd day of the NetBeans Platform Certified Engineering course, i.e, Saturday, 21 June. At some point I remember asking one of the students: "So I've been told there's a typhoon in the Philippines. Do you know where?" And he replied: "Outside that window." It was raining pretty hard but I wouldn't have ascribed that to a typhoon. Back in the hotel, at about 2 A.M, I followed the Holland-Russia match via a Dutch Internet radio station on my...

Tim and I spent the last two days (yesterday and today) delivering the NetBeans Platform Certified Training to instructors from the JEDI project in Manila, at the University of the Philippines. JEDI is a collaborative courseware project that aims to make free Computer Science instructional materials based on Java. It started in 2005 and now has 180 member schools throughout the Philippines. Here's a pic of the whole group at the end of the course: And this is a pic of the...

In How to Get a Plugin into the Plugin Manager, I reported on the general process for promoting your plugin into the update center of the Plugin Portal. The Plugin Portal update center is registered in the 6.1 Plugin Manager by default, so that your plugin will be available to users, on an equal footing with all other plugins, but only if you manage to get your plugin into the Plugin Portal update center. So a few days ago I noticed on my Zip NBMs plugin page on the Plugin...

I spent the day at the NetBeans booth and learned the following things:MySQL VP Kaj Arnö likes NetBeans. A lot. I met Leonid, who is Vladimir Voskresensky's manager at Sun in St. Peterburg. Vladimir is known in the NetBeans community as the main engineer behind the C/C++ support for NetBeans IDE. He learned Java from scratch while writing the plugin for C/C++ in NetBeans and he was interviewed some years ago here. Anyway, Leonid told me that yesterday Vladimir demoed how...

It was a funny day where many things happened, i.e., day 1 of Sun Tech Days 2008 in Manila, Philippines. Most of the day I was at the NetBeans booth in this sumptious hotel where we're all staying and where the conference is being held. The cool thing about that was that I was able to prepare my presentation for 17.30 this afternoon, named "Using NetBeans for Your Existing Projects", while sitting at the booth. (I also did quite a bit of work for Javalobby while there.) The...

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If you're building your application on top of NetBeans Platform 6.5 M1 and above (or, since M1 isn't released yet, just get the very latest development build from netbeans.org), you'll be able to limit your window system's functionality. Your application's window system comes straight from the NetBeans Platform, but you've never been able to tweak it much. That's been something several people have asked for. They want to, for example, create a fixed layout for their...