Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Despite all the discussions that have been held about the many web frameworks that have enriched the world, about their contrasts and similarities, there are two things that are undeniably true but that I have never heard mentioned—probably because most people don't look at web frameworks from the perspective of tooling in general, or IDEs in particular. The first general observation from a tooling point of view is—all frameworks are pretty similar, despite their differences....

I've heard in various places that various people consider it a significant annoyance to see all the Ant output in the Output window when, for example, a build is performed: Firstly, it's worth pointing out that you don't see ALL the Ant output. That's because ALL the Ant output includes the output produced by Ant targets that have names that start with a hyphen, although the Output window (as shown above) excludes all these targets. These are targets that can only be called...

I was reading the Code to Joy blog today because of an interesting blog entry about Groovy and JFugue, who are two of my friends in the programming world. It's very cool to see how they relate: simplified Java with simplified Midi! The best of both worlds. In the comments Guillaume from Groovy writes: "A couple years ago, I played with the idea of an Ant build listener that played JFugue little tunes when certain targets were started and finished, to have an audible...

Some years ago, Stepan Herold (who no longer works here) created a server skeleton as the basis of all server implementations, since all implementations have the same basic infrastructure. He even wrote the outline of a tutorial for this skeleton. Petr Hejl upgraded it to 6.0 a few months ago and today I finished fixing the tutorial so that the sources in the server skeleton match the description in the tutorial. Here's the updated 6.0 tutorial: NetBeans Server-Skeleton...

I've been meaning to try out the NetBeans support for the Stripes web framework for a while. Jocke Eriksson created a plugin for it recently and published it in the Plugin Portal. Go here to get it. (I found I needed a post-6.0 development build, instead of NetBeans IDE 6.0 final build, to install the plugin.) The plugin extends the Frameworks panel of the New Web Application wizard: When you click the "Example" checkbox, you get, in addition to the JARs, the sources of a...

I don't know much about the new ItsNat web framework, but enough to know that it is very friendly to NetBeans IDE. When you download and unzip the distro, you'll find you have a NetBeans project. You can then open it in the IDE and deploy it, which will result in a long list of samples being available from the browser. One of ItsNat's strengths is its IDE agnosticism (same as Wicket). In other words, there are no special artifacts, it simply uses standard Java EE artifacts...

Register this update center in the Plugin Manager: http://deadlock.netbeans.org/hudson/job/javadoc-nbms/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/nbbuild/nbms/updates.xml.gz My understanding is that that is the update center for the "contrib" module. Or, that the "contrib" module is included, together with other update centers. Either way, the "contrib" module is included. (That's the module containing community contributed modules, often in "alpha" state, so caveat emptor.) You can...

I found an interesting idea in the comments to my blog entry yesterday: dabar suggests "a netbeans plugin that can allow one to preview HTML files within Netbeans so that as I edit in Netbeans, I can click on a button and then a tab showing the preview of my HTML opens that uses the DJ component internally. Any such thing in perspective soon?" Well, I haven't managed to get that DJ Native swing project set up on Ubuntu, but sometime ago I played around with the...

The history of source file visualizers on the NetBeans Platform consists, in addition to the UML, Visual Web, and Mobility support, of three significant moments—Vadiraj Deshpande's Part 3 - XML Multiview + Visual Library, Toni Epple's A Visual Datbase Explorer for NetBeans, and Damir Tesanovic's DDL Visualizer - Visualize sql script with NetBeans. Of them all, I've looked most closely at the latter of the three, recently. The basic framework of a visualizer can be extracted...