Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

In the last day or so, Girish Patil, the engineer responsible for the (brand new!) JAXB tooling in NetBeans IDE 6.0, integrated some handy code templates. If you type 'jaxbm' in the editor, and you then press Tab to expand the abbreviation, a snippet of JAXB marshalling code is generated, with some of the variables automatically filled in, based on the code available around the invocation of the template. Similarly, when you type 'jaxbu', you'll get a snippet of JAXB...

Made some progress but still quite a long way to go. Below you see an XML file that conforms to the Palette Editor Item DTD, which is the DTD that defines the XML files that are used to display items in the palette. For example, the HTML code snippets in NetBeans IDE are defined by means of this XML file. Of course, a visual view for this XML file is completely superfluous, because one would never edit these by hand. A developer would let the user perform actions to generate...

Those who like setting up tents in rain storms or eating dry cornflakes in the eye of a tornado will like the XML Multiview API. I've blogged about it before—the end result is extremely cool, but the long road there is a twisted one. But in 6.0 things get much better! Why? Because of the cool JAXB Wizard. It can generate the entire model for you, from an XML document, like a schema or a DTD, for example. The people behind this wizard are from the Web Service Core team, so the...

I discovered I was wrong yesterday. Instead of replacing MultiDataObject with XMLDataObject, you must simply make sure that the MIME type ends in "+xml". For example, something like text/x-foo+xml. Once you've done that, the document will open in the XML Editor. In other words, you'll have syntax coloring for free, simply by ensuring that the MIME type is correct. Adding the cookies described in step 4 of yesterday's blog entry will give you the XML functionality for checking...

Thanks to help from Vadiraj, I now know how to open non-XML files in the XML editor. Sometimes you have XML content in a file that does not end in ".xml". How do you let the IDE treat it like an XML file? Below, you see a file with the extension ".test" open in the XML editor. You know it is open there because of the syntax coloring and indentation, and because of the additional menu items that relate specifically to XML files: How to do this: Use New File Type wizard, which...

Just like Elvis and Einstein were 'best of breed', so the enhanced NetBeans API wizards that I've blogged about in the past few days are in a class of their own. 'Best of breed', if you will. So, with that unlikely comparison freshly introduced to your mind, click the link below and you'll find yourself in the NetBeans Plugin Portal page dedicated to the Elvis/Einstein of the NetBeans API wizard world: http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal/faces/PluginDetailPage.jsp?plugini...

After some further 'enrichments' of the New Window Component wizard and the New File Type wizard, I am able to generate all the code needed for creating the following editor infrastructure: So this is a Multiview Editor, with a Visual Library implementation in the Visual view and a palette in the Source view. To generate the code needed for this infrastructure, I needed to set the following options, first in the New Window component wizard: And then in the New File Type...

Similar to yesterday's enhancements of the New Window Component wizard, I changed the "File Recognition" panel in the New File Type wizard to a "Features" panel. Now you can let the wizard create an editor palette or an OpenSupport implementation class, in addition to the file recognition code for which this wizard was originally intended: By default, both the new checkboxes are unselected so that by default you get exactly the same code as before. Both cannot be selected at...

Discovered a very cool thing—it is extremely easy to add functionality to the NetBeans API wizards. Here's one example. I added an "Enable Visual Library" checkbox to the New Window Component wizard: When that checkbox is selected, the Visual Library API is declared in the project.xml file, a simple GraphScene implementation class is added to the generated files, and the TopComponent constructor is extended to create the scene (together with a satelitte view). As soon as...