Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Tim's highly acclaimed 4-part selection tutorial series for the NetBeans Platform has been updated to 6.0: NetBeans Selection Management Tutorial I—Using a TopComponent's Lookup NetBeans Selection Management Tutorial II—Using Nodes NetBeans Nodes API Tutorial NetBeans Property Editor Tutorial You should follow these tutorials sequentially; they build on top of each other. They are now correct for 6.0, at least, for Milestone 10. They will of course be tried out again several...

If you use System.out and the JOptionPane to communicate with your users, or with yourself during debugging or testing, you might be interested in knowing about similar (better!) facilities that the NetBeans APIs make available: Class StatusDisplayer. Provided by the UI Utilities API, this class lets you write to the IDE's status bar. I've found this a very simple way of sending messages to myself, because it just requires you to type a single simple (yet powerful) line: Stat...

Yesterday we looked at how to disable a menu item, based on the presence/absence of an option on the command line. However, let's now go a whole step further and... disable a module based on something parsed from the command line. Let's assume we have a module that provides an Admin window, invoked from a menu item in the Help menu, as shown below: Now, if anyone other than the admin user starts up the application, the window above, as well as the menu item that shows it,...

Let's set things up so that we have an Admin menu item that is always disabled, unless the following bit in bold is present within the command line: /bin/sh "/home/geertjan/netbeans-6.0m10/bin/netbeans" --name admin So, if the "name" option is not set to "admin", we will see a greyed out Admin menu item in the Tools menu: "What?! Does that mean that my application on the NetBeans Platform can somehow parse the command line?!" Yes, that's exactly what that means. "But... wow......

There are surprisingly many ways of testing applications built on the NetBeans Platform. Or any other kind of Java application in NetBeans IDE. In this regard, the URL that you should paint on your bedroom ceiling is this one: http://testtools.netbeans.org/ That page sums everything up. Let's set up the IDE with the modules that will provide all the functionality we need. These modules will soon be in the update center, but for now can be downloaded here. When you go there,...

Toni made the start of the Peppy module available in the Plugin Portal (click here). One reason why I was hoping he'd do so is that I wanted to learn from his GlassPane code, because he now has Peppy in a dragable format, so that one can drag him around the entire frame of the IDE. Or your own application. That's quite fun. And a variety of random tips bubble from his mouth: When you click the "More..." link in the speech bubble, you're taken straight to Kirk's Performance...

Finally, thanks to Josh Sandusky, I managed to get code completion in a JEditorPane, by reusing the NetBeans Java Editor. Here's a TopComponent that contains the NetBeans Java Editor in a JEditorPane: The syntax coloring is very basic, but that's the syntax coloring in my current version of NetBeans IDE 6.0. The code that you see above is the constructor of the TopComponent, which associates the NetBeans Java Editor with the JEditorPane. One needs to create a Java file...

In PrintCookie (Part 1) we enabled the Print menu item. But, so what? That's like switching on the oven—nothing more than a means to an end. Let's now actually use the PrintCookie. But, first, how does it work? Wouldn't it be simpler to just create a "Print" button on our TopComponent, so that we could click it whenever we want to print the content of the TopComponent? Yes, it would, possibly. But then you wouldn't be providing the same user experience as provided by all the...

Toni Epple sent me a link to some pics from the NetBeans User Group meeting in Munich last week. Click here to see them. I found some more on my own camera, taken at the Gap bar in Munich afterwards. They're of some of the attendees chilling out and talking about... hmmm... I can't remember what about. But it was definitely fun, as can be seen here: Above, sitting next to me is Toni Epple from GenoMatix, the creator of 'Peppy', the new Clippy that will take the NetBeans...