Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Drag and drop a desktop icon of a file onto the NetBeans desktop icon... ...and the IDE will start up, with the specified file open in the editor. That's always been possible, but is [as far as I am aware] completely unknown.

Today an e-mail came in to the dev@openide.netbeans.org mailing list (the place you want to be if you're interested in the NetBeans Platform or in NetBeans plugin development generally) from Mark Nuttall. He asks: "Where do I snag the current Lookup API from if I want to use it outside of the NetBeans Platform." The short answer to that question is: go to the IDE's installation directory and then to the platform8/lib folder, where you will find the org-openide-util.jar. Just...

My Deployment History plugin is basically finished. I think it is self explanatory from the screenshot below. The nice thing is that an application can even be redeployed if it isn't open in the IDE anymore: However, note that the latest version of the application is always run (i.e., I don't save the application as such, so you can't go back in time and run an earlier version of your application, which would be cool and is something I'll investigate). I'm going to add some...

I'm halfway done with Gareth Uren's suggestion, as recorded in my blog entry yesterday: "a drop down button factory displaying recently run projects that can then be selected and then immediately run again". It isn't implemented in a drop down button factory, but a window. And the entries in the window can't be redeployed yet (so, right now, only a new entry is generated upon deployment, no redeployment can be peformed yet). However, it's pretty cool to see the deployed app's...

Another pretty excellent day. I basically spent the entire day at the booth. Sang had asked me to join him in his hands on lab on performance and profiling for web applications, because of that topic's connection to VisualVM. He proposed that I would spend some of the hands on lab introducing VisualVM. I didn't think I'd be able to say that much about it (it is, after all, a visual application, hence spending a lot of time talking about it seems slightly beside the point),...

Several highlights today—presenting VisualVM during Jeff Jackson's keynote speech; participating in the "demo showcase" shootout with Sun evangelists (during which time I showed off the Swing Application Framework tooling that creates a database-accessing Swing application, ending with the always-funny crowd-pleasing Napkin look and feel); the many (very many) interactions with users; the questions; the answers; the new things I learned about NetBeans IDE. (By the way, about...

NetBeans Day has come and gone and it was pretty good. Brian started with the "New & Cool" session, during which time he demonstrated lots of stuff. Editor improvements, but also Ruby/Rails and Groovy/Grails support were shown! The first time Groovy/Grails was demonstrated at a NetBeans Day. The thing I learned the most from was the JavaScript support he demoed, in 6.1 Beta. He also did a great iReport demo. I also discovered that Ctrl-R (inplace rename) is MUCH better in...

Update on 30 May 2008: The code and steps in this blog entry have been updated to reflect the VisualVM 1.0 APIs. If you want to download the complete sources of the sample discussed here, get the VisualVM Sample Collection from the Plugin Portal. I've made some significant strides in my understanding of the VisualVM APIs. I've been following some discussions around this tool and people were asking if a single tab could be displayed to compare multiple instances of the same...

I was learning about org.openide.awt.DropDownButtonFactory yesterday, because of the cool Profiler drop-down buttons in the IDE's toolbar. I assumed they came from some private package and that I'd have to hack the code somehow but then discovered org.openide.awt.DropDownButtonFactory and the fact that it is publicly available and has been that way for a while already. I then came across Vadiraj's excellent blog entry on this topic and his reference to the FAQ How do I add a...