Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

The OpenOffice.org developers of the NetBeans plugin for OpenOffice.org are in Prague today. I attended an interesting presentation where they demoed their plugin this morning. One of several things I learned about was their very cool Extensions site: http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/ Unfortunately, however, you cannot see (currently) from inside OpenOffice.org which extensions are available. On the other hand, this is a feature that NetBeans IDE 6.1 Beta does have...

I published version 2 of the Extended Java Project Sample. There is one very big improvement: FreeMarker is used. As a result, you can perform iterations and other code logic right within the template, instead of needing to do so in the code. There's also a lot less code in general in the sample now. One reason for that is that I discovered a simpler way of accessing a file inside the module's sources. This is how the WordLibrary.ftl file is located, instead of reading input...

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" ...