Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

If you study Tim's Wicket tag parser, which underlies the navigator mentioned in yesterday's blog entry, then you'll find it's not very hard to adapt it to your own purposes. For example, here's the same parser in action, but slightly modified. Here, instead of looking for Wicket tags, it looks for all words in the document and then prints them to the navigator: Why might this be useful? Well, it's now a small step to a spell checker. The user would specify a file containing...

The Wicket suite for NetBeans IDE 6.0, discussed yesterday, contains (the start of) a Wicket tag navigator, as shown below: Right now, nothing happens when you click a tag in the navigator. However, ultimately, the related HTML document will open and the cursor will land on the selected Wicket tag. From there, you can hold down the Ctrl key, move the mouse over the tag in the editor, and then the tag becomes a hyperlink, which you can click to open the corresponding Java...

The latest contributor to the NetBeans Wicket Support Project is Tim Boudreau himself. As a direct result, most of the 5.5 functionality is already available for 6.0, even though 6.0 doesn't officially exist yet. To check things out, go here and check out branch nb_60. Then open 'suite', which will give you this: Run the suite. A new instance of the IDE starts up, installing the above two modules. Since you also have the source code of the modules, feel free to extend them...

After the sudden and unexpected acceleration of developments in relation to the JFugue Music NotePad, I thought it might be time to... introduce the application to 6.0. In other words, we've been basing it on 5.5 thus far. Moving it to 6.0 would take a lot of work, no? In fact, no, it was a lot less work than I had thought. Then again, the application doesn't make use of much of the APIs that have undergone change. Specifically, if your application makes use of the...

In Tim's Selection Tutorials Ported to 6.0, I announced that the 4-part selection series, by Tim Boudreau, is available for 6.0. However, before you follow those tutorials, you probably need to take some orientating steps through the NetBeans Platform tools and some of the main APIs. Now, the main NetBeans Platform tutorials are also available for 6.0: NetBeans Platform 6.0 Quick Start Tutorial NetBeans Platform 6.0 Paint Application Tutorial NetBeans Platform 6.0 Feed Reader...

I've added the print functionality described here and here. As a result, when you have this in your music sheet... ...and you then choose 'Print' under the File menu, you will be shown this print preview: And from there, you should be able to print it, by choosing 'Print' in the print preview dialog above. However, because of the second rule for a paperless office (as described here) I am unable to test out the print functionality... :-) In other news. I forgot to mention...

One of the biggest issues in the free and open source JFugue Music NotePad has always been the fact that one wasn't able to move notes after dropping them. That, all on its own, made the application unusable in real world scenarios. But... guess what? Someone called Michal Fapso, studying Graphical User Interfaces in Java at the Faculty of Information Technology in Brno in the Czech Republic, came across the project. And he had chosen to work on a music score editor for a...

One underhighlighted improvement in the upcoming NetBeans IDE 6.0 is that it will support keyboard users far more than before. When coding, I really hate having to break the flow of my activity by needing to call up dialog boxes and then having to click various things within them. Of course, there are ways of calling up those dialog boxes without using a mouse, but those keyboard combinations are a bit tricky and my life would be simpler if I could simply continue typing...

This week, an interesting article was published (here) about Instant JChem (IJC), which is an IDE for scientists. There's a lot of reason for celebration—IJC 2.0 has just been released. IJC is a complete out-of-box application for working easily and efficiently with chemical structures. The article quotes IJC lead developer Tim Dudgeon as saying: "Scientists want a powerful yet easy-to-use application that lets them sketch structures and run queries efficiently while...