Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

I met with Toni Epple in a Munich beer garden this afternoon and we talked about my recent blog entry where I ported some of Kirk Pepperdine's code to the NetBeans Platform. Jokingly, I had entitled that blog entry 'Porting Kirk Pepperdine to the NetBeans Platform'. Toni suggested that further integration would entail a GlassPane, with Kirk appearing at unexpected moments to give random performance tips to the unwary NetBeans user. We came up with 'Peppy' as the name of this...

An extremely tricky, and potentially frustrating, area of the NetBeans Platform is the PrintCookie. Before anything else, if you do not understand what a Cookie is, in the NetBeans world, then you will be even more confused. A Cookie, simply put, is a capability. So an OpenCookie is the capability attributed to something to open the thing in question. It's like the ThinkCookie is the capability given to (some) people enabling them to think. For things that open in the editor,...

I had an excellent evening with the NetBeans User Group in Munich. About 30 or so, all hosted at the company where Toni Epple works. My presentation was 'Porting a Java Application to the NetBeans Platform'. Then there was a small session hanging out in a pub. We learned a lot from each other, but more about that in a future blog entry. I got back to the hotel to find an e-mail from Kirk Pepperdine, with some source code that he wanted to port to the NetBeans Platform....

Finally got TwinView working on Ubuntu! Although various people, after my earlier appeal on this subject, were extremely helpful in telling me about nvidia-settings, the Detect Settings button, the TwinView option, and 'Clone', no one told me... that the laptop's resolution needs to be set to the same resolution as the external display (i.e., the beamer)... and not the other way round. The beamer's resolution is fixed, while my laptop's resolution needs to be set to match it....

HTML parsing is a wonderful thing. In Parsing HTML for Links and Writing to the Output Window (Part1), I provided all the keys to unlock this particular puzzle. There, we parse HTML documents for HREF attributes and then write their values to the Output window as self-referencing hyperlinks. That's useful, especially when you can determine whether those links are broken or not, which is what I showed over the last few days. But how about a different scenario. Purely...

There are two NetBeans API classes that are extremely important to know. They are useful in a very wide variety of scenarios. Here they are: org.openide.filesystems.FileUtil. Provides countless useful methods that you absolutely cannot do without when creating NetBeans modules. Without question, my two favorites are FileUtil.toFile(FileObject fo) and FileUtil.toFileObject(File file). But, right now, since looking at that whole javadoc page, I see there's also a FileUtil.norma...

My link check feature now works mostly in the way that I would expect it to. From the Tools menu on folder and file nodes, I can choose 'Link Check' and then the file, or all files within the folder, are checked. Broken links are written to the Output window and an annotation is attached to the line in the editor: Above, the link check is done on the high-level 'docs' folder, which contains all the subfolders of my help system. In other words, I am now able to perform a link...

My link checker has turned into a pretty useful feature already, despite some minor flaws. Either on an HTML document's node, or in the HTML editor, or on a folder containing at least one HTML document, I can now select the new 'Link Check' menu item. When chosen on document-level, the Output window then immediately contains a list of hyperlinks, one for each HREF attribute in the document, prefaced either by 'ok' or 'broken'. When an 'ok' hyperlink is clicked, the corrctly...

The nice thing about yesterday's blog entry is that now I can check links... in TOC files. And that's also not nice, because there's a lot more to a helpset than a TOC file. And the broken links are more likely to be found in all the other HTML files, not in the TOC file. So... how to do a link check, programmatically, for links in HTML files, within the IDE? I haven't yet got all of the answer, but I'm certainly a long way there. The first step, I concluded, was to be able...