Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Some might know that I've been posting articles on Javalobby since some time last year. I've found it to be a great experience. The exposure your thoughts get out there is so much broader than within a language-specific or tool-specific community. The range of topics I've written on have been pretty broad and the number of people I've "met" (i.e., virtually) for interviews has been interesting. Recently, Javalobby reconstituted itself, moving from a Java focus to something far...

Today I got a new laptop at work. A few weeks ago I was given the choice: either Sony VAIO, Apple Mac, or something else that I can't remember. Since I'd been very happy with Sony VAIO (and confused with Apple's direction with Java), the choice was easily made. I was surprised to discover that I ended up with a whole new model. Instead of the VGN-S5HP/B I found myself with a totally different model, bearing a name that rolls just as easily off the tongue: VGN-SZ5XN/C: Maybe...

A continuation from yesterday—this time, instead of a JTable and a JTextField, we'll look at a JList and a JTextField. I realized yesterday, after writing that blog entry, that it was pretty dumb to set the JTextFields as not editable while the update strategy was READ_WRITE. Had I made the JTextFields editable, I would have been able to update the currently selected row in the table, from the related JTextFields. So this time I won't make that mistake. As yesterday, we will...

At the end of my blog entry yesterday, Mark Ashworth writes: "I would just like to know if there is a demo or tutorial on how to use binding with List and JTable." Well, Mark, especially for you I've created a small yet powerful demo that relies heavily on beans binding (JSR-295). It could also have made use of the Swing Application Framework (JSR-296), but, so as not to confuse things, I've not touched that area at all here. At the end of this blog entry, you'll have a JFrame...

If you want to really understand "beans binding", i.e., JSR-295, you can study lots of documents. Alternatively, you can go through a small but very powerful demo, here. At the end, you have a bean, which has properties that you bind to Swing components. No coding at all, because the NetBeans tooling makes it a point-and-click experience. At the end, and only a few clicks later, I moved the demo to the NetBeans Platform, installing it in the IDE's "output" window position. (I...

To celebrate the MySQL acquisition, here's some further integration (on top of that provided by 6.0, by default, by means of which you can register a MySQL connection, start/stop and even create MySQL databases). First, I followed the Options Window Module Tutorial and ended up with an extension to the Options window: Then, as explained in the above tutorial, I passed on the file identified above and used it in a menu item's performAction: Preferences pref =...

The tooling support that the IDE has for JSR-296 is really awesome. There's so much of it. To get myself up to speed, I went through this demo, which gets you a nice application for searching Flickr: The above is a pic taken at JavaOne last year, of myself, and my fellow authors of the book 'Rich Client Programming: Plugging into the NetBeans Platform'. The best parts that the Flickr demo show are, in my opinion: The ready-to-run application framework that the New...

I'd like to begin using my blog to host occasional discussions around the NetBeans Platform. I'm hoping NetBeans Platform developers out there who have thoughts on the topic under discussion and, in particular, have implemented something in their own application that matches the requirement in the discussion, will step forward and share their thoughts in the comments. Typically, the topics I'll choose will be ones that require more than one word answers. And they'll be based...

In the NetBeans 6.1 Milestone 1 Announcement, there is a cryptic line that reads as follows: "Slided-in windows can be made transparent to see what's beneath them." What does it mean? I didn't know either but tracked down the related engineer and now I know. The words "slided-in windows" actually mean "minimized windows". That's where my confusion started because I couldn't relate the words "slided-in windows" to anything I was familiar with. So, what's the deal...