Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

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...

NetBeans IDE 6.1 Milestone 1 provides support for all the following servers, out of the box, without requiring you to add a single plugin of any kind: Plus, NetBeans APIs and a tutorial are available, as described in detail here, for providing support for additional servers, though this is not a task to be taken on lightly.

Let's create a memory monitor for NetBeans IDE! "Geez. A memory monitor. That sounds hard. Where would one even begin?" Well, the answer to that question is the demo/management folder in the JDK. Handily, you'll find an application there called "MemoryMonitor". So I created a new module, used the Window Component wizard to create a TopComponent (specify that it should open in the "properties" position), copied the MemoryMonitor class from the demo into my source structure,...

Today I was asked about obfuscation. In fact, the question was "how to obfuscate code in NetBeans". Well, code in NetBeans is like any other Java code anywhere else. And others have had the same need. I looked into it and came up with the following:Download ProGuard. In your build.xml, add the target outlined in this handy FAQ: Can I obfuscate a module? Just make sure to replace ${proguard.jar.path} with the full path to the proguard.jar, which can be anywhere. Also remove...

Charlie Hunt, one of Sun's performance gurus, is in town (where "town" equals "Prague, Czech Republic") and we've been studying the JDK's JTop plugin for JConsole, with a view to porting it to a NetBeans module. Let me tell you, it was not easy to figure out, at least initially. JTop consists of a class that extends JConsolePlugin, which integrates with JConsole, as well as a JPanel, which provided the actual user interface. We ended up dumping the JConsolePlugin class complet...

My excellent colleague Sun evangelist Chuk Munn Lee wrote me an e-mail in response to my description yesterday of the JConsole plugin: "I did not know that the visual library can be used outside of NetBeans. Do you need a special build of the library? Do I need to build it myself or is there a standalone version that I can download?" This is a good question and the answer is illustrative of how interwoven NetBeans IDE is with the NetBeans Platform. Look in your NetBeans...

While reading Beginning Java SE 6 Platform: From Novice to Professional, I discovered for the first time that the JConsole is pluggable, since Java SE 6. That's maybe not exactly news, if you're a friend of JConsole and have followed its adventures over the past years. Personally, I'm more interested in JConsole's pluggability than JConsole itself. The JDK provides a set of demos, some of which are helpful in understanding how plugins work in relation to JConsole. Go to demo/m...

Did you know that the JDK comes with a rather massive amount of demos and samples... and that several of those are NetBeans projects? Until today, I didn't know that. I'm pretty sure that most people I know don't know that either, because otherwise we'd have published some kind of document or something similar about it, somewhere. Here's the evidence. Below, everything with an orange icon is a NetBeans project. So, you can open the entire directory of demos and the entire...

Another extremely significant moment in the lifecycle of the NetBeans Platform. This morning I received the German-language book NetBeans Platform 6: Rich-Client-Entwicklung mit Java, by Heiko Bock, which was published during the past month. As co-author of Rich Client Programming: Plugging into the NetBeans Platform, I can say without any hesitation that Heiko's book is better. The book covers many areas of the NetBeans 6 APIs, such as the Visual Library API, areas that we...