Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

One of the cool encounters at JavaOne was with Maxim Zakharenkov, who is from Latvia, and his https://swingexplorer.dev.java.net/ project. The tool lets you introspect Swing applications and is discussed on Javalobby as well. Max told me that there's already an Eclipse plugin for his tool, but nothing for NetBeans IDE. We spent some time together yesterday and made quite some progress. First, you need to be able to launch the Swing Explorer together with your own application....

One of the dozens of interesting things I've picked up at JavaOne is... a very cool new keyboard shortcut that is in post-6.1 development builds. I.e., this is not in 6.1. You'd need to get a development build. Once you've done so, put your cursor on an identifier in your Java code, as shown below: Great, all the occurrences of the selected identifier are marked, as in 6.0 and 6.1. Now how do you navigate between those marked occurrences? Wouldn't it be cool if you could hold...

Go to https://nbrichfacessupport.dev.java.net/index.html and you will be able to read all about this new project and check out the sources. Join the project and contribute, especially if you have cool snippets that should be added to the RichFaces palette. I will start populating the Issue database with new requests for enhancements soon.

I did a short demo of RichFaces support during NetBeans Day yesterday. It went without a hitch, producing this result in the browser: Note especially the "Zoom" slider at the bottom of the page, which works as you would expect, i.e., the map is zoomed as the slider position changes. Here's the editor, containing everything needed for the above, while also showing the palette with two new items, one for the map and one for the slider: I made several small changes to the support...

In the comments to my announcement about RichFaces in NetBeans IDE 6.1, yesterday, someone asked for tag completion. Well, that's already possible automatically when you install the plugin I mentioned yesterday. Since the libraries are on the classpath and the necessary declarations are generated right into the JSP page, you can immediately use tag completion (Ctrl-Space) in the generated page, as well as in any other JSP page where you add the declarations, which will result...

Yesterday I met with Wouter van Reeven, here in San Francisco, who mentioned the RichFaces framework to me. In particular, people in a JBoss-oriented world are likely to want to use RichFaces (as well as ICEfaces, Seam, and Facelets). For ICEfaces, a NetBeans plugin exists (here), though it works in 6.0 only. I've tried it, it's a pretty cool thing: you get support both for traditional web applications and for Visual Web applications. I'm hoping they'll upgrade to 6.1...

Today we uploaded the latest NBMs of our Wicket support into the Plugin Portal: http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal/faces/PluginDetailPage.jsp?pluginid=3586 There are several changes, some mentioned recently in this blog. Basically, the names of the generated templates are friendlier, the JARs are Wicket 1.3.3 instead of 1.3.0, some useless options have been removed from the Frameworks panel, the Wicket Stylesheet support is part of the generated code, the Wicket filter...

As your application gets larger, the end user experiences two problems: the download size increases and performance slows down. Not necessarily so, but the likelihood of these problems increases as time goes by. That's where modular systems come in handy, because they let the end user choose the modules they want while discarding all those they don't need. However, that process is problematic. How does the end user know which module provides which features? And then there's...

The org.openide.filesystems.FileUtil.findBrother method is typically used by the Matisse GUI Builder so that if a file named "xyz.java" is in the same folder as a file named "xyz.frm", the two are merged together and opened as one in the editor. Specifically, FileUtil.findBrother takes a FileObject and a file extension, which is the file extension of the "brother" file. There are several other conceivable scenarios where this functionality might be handy, such as Wicket,...