Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Thanks to R.J. Lorimer's excellent Javalobby article on the SwingLabs project's JXTipOfTheDay (click here to read it), I've created a simple module that provides this functionality for NetBeans IDE: The interesting bit is that the tips are defined in the application's user directory, in a properties file, which means that you can change the tips whenever you feel like it. So you're not locked into the tips provided by the module. Also, thanks to this snippet in the layer.xml f...

I got a great tip from NetBeans Platform application developer Maksim Mednik the other day. Way back on April 26 and April 27, I wrote about the consequences of the resolution of issue 92570. In a nutshell, you can now show a dialog box before an application's main window opens. In other words, that's the spot where a login screen can be shown. Maxim took a next step in this scenario by... implementing the Authentication Framework provided by SwingLabs. The result is pretty...

In Schema2Beans Generator, I wrote about a module I've made available on the Plugin Portal, based on code written by Toni Epple, for generating beans from XML Schemas. If you install the module, as described in the link above, you will end up with this wizard, which will generate the beans for you: However, there are various problems with Schema2Beans. One of them, I've been told, is that it should actually be called Dtd2Beans, because it only works with DTDs, and not with...

In 5.5, I get a red error marking along the whole line, because of a missing import statement: In 6.0, only the class that is problematic is underlined (plus it is shown in italics): This means I can see in one glance exactly where the problem is, before even invoking the lightbulb, which was not possible in 5.5. The NetBeans API class Line.Part, discussed here, makes this possible. Very nice! In other news. Made a start with the Errata for the book "Rich Client Programming:...

Issue 11 in yesterday's blog entry presents an interesting problem: "No check is done to make sure that the selected icons are of the correct dimensions. So, if the small icon that you select is extremely large, there's nothing protecting you from making that mistake." Imagine that the user chooses a very large icon and you perform no check to prevent that. The Preview panel at the bottom of the dialog box would be covered by the new icon, which would be very ugly, and the...

With this module, you open a Java source file, select some code with the mouse, and drag it over an existing category or item in the palette. Somewhere along the way, you need to hold down the Ctrl key, because you need to do a copy action, not a cut or move action. If all the above conditions are met, you get the following dialog box, which in this case I have filled out with a display name and tooltip: You can either choose new icons or accept the default. But what if you...

Attended an evening of the Prague Writers Festival. Three writers got interviewed, one by one, by various interesting or less interesting interviewers. Funny moments: First question for Writer 1 (James Meek): "So, this is your first book..." Response from Writer 1: "Well, actually, this is my third book..." Later, in the same interview: "Your book has quite a lot of violence in it..." Response: "Not really. There's just a little bit of castration and cannabilism. But, apart...

I received an interesting bit of code from Stan Aubrecht, the NetBeans drag-and-drop king, yesterday. It is an implementation of the NetBeans API org.netbeans.spi.palette.DragAndDropHandler class. It lets you drag a piece of code from the editor into the palette: private static class MyHandler extends DragAndDropHandler { public void customize(ExTransferable t, Lookup item) { } @Override public boolean canDrop(Lookup targetCategory, DataFlavor[] flavors, int...

There've been lots of questions recently about the new 6.0 functionality that allows you to register palettes in the layer file. Previously, the palette had to be created in the editor's constructor. Now, since it can be registered in the layer file, you can create a palette in a different module to where the target editor is found. The most applicable scenario seems to me to be the one where you want to create palette items for Java source files. In the past, you'd have to...