Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

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...

An interesting screenshot received from my colleague Martin Adamek last week:

There's a cool new thing in NetBeans land. A new way of distributing your applications... make a link to a ZIP containing your application available and when someone clicks the link, NetBeans IDE opens, displaying the unzipped application in the Projects window. Try it. Click this link and you'll open the Anagram Game, via my blog: http://www.netbeans.info/services/openproject.jnlp?projecturl=http://blogs.sun.com/geertjan/resource/AnagramGame.zip When you click the above...

In NetBeans IDE 6.0, you'll find a very powerful new feature... the Web Service Designer. In 6.0 Milestone 9, this is what it looked like: The source view shows standard JAX-WS code. (The three buttons at the top, "Reliable Messaging", "MTOM", and "Security", indicate something else that's very good news... WSIT will be a standard part of NetBeans IDE 6.0.) Pretty cool feature, initially for creating web services, but ultimately for managing them and for getting a quick...

Although it's not hard to create NetBeans project templates, it's quite painful to have to update them, unless you know about what I'm going to tell you about in this blog entry. A project template is created by a wizard and each consists of a number of things. Firstly, most importantly, the template itself, in the form of a ZIP file. The template is normally an entire application, with its own sources and build files, and so on. But, in addition, a project template includes...

One of the few remaining questions in my life has been solved... I have finally managed to put the NASA World Wind globe into the NetBeans Platform: The reason why it didn't work before was that if the 'ide7' cluster is enabled, an NPE is thrown in this case. Fabrizio Giudici, who has integrated World Wind into his blueMarine project sometime ago (click here to see it in action), was the one who provided me with the missing piece of this puzzle. I asked him to try to work out...

I am a big fan of the NetBeans Collaboration Module and decided to see how/if it worked in today's 6.0 daily development build. First time for me with this module in 6.0. Plus, it would be my first time to use the Collaboration Module on Ubuntu, since I'm a recent convert to Linux, via Ubuntu. And, there were no problems at all. I found I could very easily minimize the amount of space taken up by the module, as can be seen below (I moved it all the way to the right of the IDE...

In 5.5 (and, possibly 5.5.1, but definitely not 6.0) install this module: org-netbeans-modules-textfiledictionaryprojecttemplate.nbm After installing the module, you will find this new sample in the New Project wizard: When you complete the New Project wizard, you will find a module suite in the Projects window: Right-click the above and choose Run. A new instance of the IDE starts up, installing the suite's three modules in the newly started IDE. When you open a text file, you...