Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

I like Ubuntu's text editor, especially for XML files it's great—gives you very nice syntax coloring. So I created a menu item on XML file nodes in NetBeans IDE, especially for opening an XML file into Ubuntu's text editor. That way, I simply have an extra window for editing XML. Not super useful functionality, but handy sometimes. To create this action, use the New Action wizard to create a new conditional action (i.e., not "always enabled"), for DataObjects. Specify that it...

A few days ago, based on a request from a user, I published a sample to the Plugin Portal to show how a project template can be extended with a new panel. Now I've extended it to do what the user probably really wants to do: use the new panel to generate a file which, in this case, is a class. The plugin that you get from the Plugin Portal will, once installed, give you a new plugin sample in the NetBeans Modules category in the New Project wizard. Once you install that,...

I've blogged about hints before and about how cool it would be for users out there to create hints so as to increase (even further) the power of the NetBeans Java Editor. But now it's a simplified process: http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal/faces/PluginDetailPage.jsp?pluginid=6784 Install that plugin and read the accompanying instructions. Here's where you'll find the new template, once you've installed the above plugin:

Small(ish) but annoying pet peeve of mine: I need an image for an application that I'm coding in NetBeans IDE. I go on-line and find the image that I need. I right-click the image on-line and save it right there, from my browser, into my application's source structure. Then... dang! I open the image in the IDE and see that... its size is not what I would want it to be. So... I need to go outside the IDE (where it is cold, cold, cold) and change the image size there. Why?...

I suddenly realized that my ruminations on org.openide.xml.XMLUtil, yesterday, might be helpful to someone I met at the NetBeans booth at Sun Tech Days in Johannesburg, a few weeks ago. He wanted to create a NetBeans plugin that would generate language-specific client stubs from a WSDL file. The basic concept is that you would open the WSDL file in the IDE, right-click inside it, and then choose a menu item that says, something like, "Generate Client Stubs". And then...

The cool thing about the new Spring support in NetBeans IDE 6.1 is the fact that you can extend it. A very simple entry point into the Spring support is its dedicated MIME type, x-springconfig+xml. Via this MIME type, you can add a new menu item, either to the editor or to the node in the explorer view, specifically for Spring configuration files. Using this technique, I added a menu item called "Generate Java from Beans": What happens when the menu item is selected? You get...

My first encounter with Spring is through its Util schema. I used NetBeans IDE 6.1 Beta, since this version of NetBeans IDE sports a set of features specifically for Spring, for the first time. There's support for web applications (which I will discuss in a future blog entry), but also for Java SE applications. Here's my first Spring configuration file in a Java SE application: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" ...

Very recent 6.1 development builds should bring joy to those of us who have long argued for improvements in the discoverability of tools for NetBeans Platform development. There is now a brand new template for this purpose: When you complete the wizard, you have an empty application, i.e., unlike the module suite template, which comes with all the IDE's modules installed. Simply run it, without doing anything special beforehand, and you have an empty application, with all...

A few days ago I blogged about using the NetBeans Lookup API outside the NetBeans Platform. I referred to the very handy Creating Extensible Applications With the Java Platform, by John O'Conner, and then wrote How to Create a Pluggable Photo Album in Java on Javalobby. The next logical step was to move my pluggable photo album to the NetBeans Platform: Now, instead of three Java applications, I have three modules. The first (module 1) provides the TopComponent, an SPI...