Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

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...

I went over to Adam Myatt's book site on Apress.com and found that I could download a ZIP file with ALL the book's samples: Supplementary Material Download I had no special access of any kind, so anyone should be able to do so. Here's what you get: I couldn't fit all the samples into a single screenshot, so here's the rest of them: Note 1: Maybe this is too obvious to mention, but you need to have the correct pieces of NetBeans IDE installed for the samples to work. For example,...

If you are thinking about creating plugins for VisualVM, here are two resources that will hopefully make your life easier. They are both still being reviewed and the APIs that they describe are still under development. But, for the adventurous type of programmer, and those who want to get a general impression of what VisualVM plugin development is all about, here's your chance for an early preview: Getting Started Extending VisualVM. Gives you some background information...

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. On its most abstract level, VisualVM is simply a tool for displaying data. By default, it displays data relating to applications, hosts, dumps, and snapshots. However, it could, theoretically, display any data at all (photos, for...

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. Until now, we've only dealt with applications in the context of VisualVM. But applications are only one source of data for VisualVM. There are a few others, one of which is "Host". That is a class that provides the common interface...

Update on 28 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. In part 2 of this series, I talked about extending the Overview tab in VisualVM. At the time, I didn't realize that you can also extend the Monitor tab and the Threads tab. In each case, when you initialize the plugin that provides...

Update on 30 May 2008: If you want to download the complete sources of the sample discussed here, get the VisualVM Sample Collection from the Plugin Portal. In response to the question from Klaus at the end of my blog entry yesterday—yes, you can add subnodes to the application type node in VisualVM. Below you see two examples. The upper part shows a set of subnodes created by the GlassFish plugin for VisualVM, which you can get from visualvm.dev.java.net, together with the...

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. In Getting Started Extending VisualVM (Part 1), yesterday, we used a DataSourceViewProvider to create a new DataSourceView. The latter was available to all types of applications shown in VisualVM. Today we'll create a...

Update on 28 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. VisualVM, i.e., the bundling of the JDK's troubleshooting tools, is perfectly positioned to become the Java developer's troubleshooter of choice—free, open source, active mailing list, with a bunch of great programmers working on...