Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

I have over 20 plugins in the NetBeans Plugin Portal. If nothing else, this qualifies me as someone who knows a bit about usage of this cool site, which is mainly driven by David Botterill. Here are the top 5 aspects, as far as I am concerned.Simplicity. You can very easily upload your plugin. No pain at all. Click an Upload button, fill in a very few details, and Bob's your auntie. Statistics. Simple as falling off a log to see which of your plugins are most popular. Here are...

If you go here in the Plugin Portal, you'll find I've uploaded a new ZIP file, called groovynbms-4.zip (the previous one was called groovynbms-3.zip). In other words, when you click the Download button, you will get groovynbms-4.zip. This time you will have five modules instead of three and this time each of them has a description, as indicated here: Please make sure to be using NetBeans IDE 6.0 Beta 2. If you're using something later (like a daily build), it might still...

InfoQ has a great (i.e., entertaining, interesting, and pragmatic) interview with two Domain Specific Language (DSL) developers, here. I highly recommend watching it. In that interview, Ruby is used to define the DSL, but Groovy can also be used for this purpose, for which all the related resources can be found here. But, I wanted to really understand what all of this is about, and even though the sessions on this subject at the Grails eXchange were helpful, it wasn't until...

A first experiment—I created a module suite, added a library wrapper containing the Groovy JAR, another library wrapper containing the JAR of the Groovy-Java-mixed application I created earlier, and then a new module with a TopComponent that calls the Groovy class in the aforementioned Groovy-Java-mixed application. This is exactly how one works with web service clients on the NetBeans Platform (i.e., create the JAX-WS client stubs in a standard Java application and then wrap...

Using the script referred to yesterday, with some modifications by Bernhard (see the comments in yesterday's blog entry), I added a JFrame, which feeds the values to the Groovy script as follows: Scanner scanner = new Scanner();scanner.scan(folderField.getText(), extField.getText(), searchField.getText()); The lines above are everything that is found in searchButtonActionPerformed. And here's the result, showing the source structure, running application, and output in the...

A script in Groovy for pulling all lines with HREF attributes from all HTML files within a folder, as well as all of its immediate subfolders. I call this script from a Java class, as explained in a previous blog entry. The result is that the Output window is then populated with all lines containing an HREF attribute: Here's the script, could probably be a lot better, especially the part where the next level is found: package demojavaapplicationclass HelloWorld { def basedir...

Jeremy Rayner's interview on Javalobby, where he talks about Groovydoc and the related Ant task, got me thinking about a simple extension to the Java Application project type. Extending existing project types is possible from 6.0 onwards, as explained in this tutorial. So I added a new panel to the project customizer for Java applications, which looks as follows: Assuming both checkboxes are selected, the user now has (assuming OK is clicked) two new Ant scripts in the nbproj...

I've been squirriling away some Groovy editor support for a while. Today I put it all on a site I had requested sometime ago. It's not necessarily much, but gets the job done, basic syntax coloring, a file template, and a run script action via JSR 223 (hence you need JDK 6). Go here: http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal/faces/PluginDetailPage.jsp?pluginid=3914 I intend to continue squirriling, bit by bit, as time goes by. But there's definitely enough there already for...

When I blogged about stepping through Groovy recently (here), Peter Williams left this question in the comments: "Are groovy variables typed and/or can their type change dynamically (e.g. x="foo" followed by x=1 being legal, though the type is changing from string to integer?) If so, is the NetBeans debugger displaying this change properly?" Well, today I had a look, curious to see what would happen. Here's my Groovy script, with a variable called "thing", which is first...