Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Roumen told me about Tor using FreeTTS during one of his presentations at JavaOne. It is a free open source speech synthesizer. In Java. I combined a small code snippet (thanks Roumen), with this web service (which I blogged about a lot about a year ago): http://www.xmlme.com/WSShakespeare.asmx And now, as a result, I need never read Shakespeare again. Why? Because my application reads it for me. Here's the simple user interface: First, I click Fetch, then the snippet is sent...

This is the NetBeans About dialog box that we all know and love: The question for today is: "How far can we go in deconstructing this dialog box? How far can we break it down to its bare elements and then rebuild it in our own image?" My image is humble, hence this is the result of the quest outlined above: Before continuing, please note that the solution is possibly really simple. Just use the XML layer file to hide the menu item that produces the About dialog box, add a new...

Have you read or are you reading Rich Client Programming: Plugging into the NetBeans Platform? If so, why not write a review on the book's site on Amazon? Here's a link to the book's Amazon site. By adding reviews there, you're providing information that others, deciding whether they want to buy the book or not, might find useful. In addition, the book can also be bought here: http://sunlibrary.safaribooksonline.com/9780132354806 That's on the Safari Books Online site. While...

I'd have put this on the Plugin Portal, but I don't seem to be able to access it. So here it is, very basic Groovy support: BasicGroovy.zip I got an error when I switched to the Console view on Ubuntu Linux, but encountered no such error on Windows. So as far as I know, this works on Windows. Download the ZIP file above and you'll find three NBM files. Install them in 6.0 Preview (Milestone 9) and you'll be able to use the functionality illustrated in the following few...

There's some debate in mailing lists and other places about the wisdom or otherwise of continuing to bundle Tomcat with NetBeans IDE. Some believe that it would make more sense to favor GlassFish, at least partly since it is an open-source alternative to Tomcat (although the latter is a web server, while the former is an application server), while others argue that Tomcat is pretty much the de-facto web server of choice, hence an IDE would be shooting itself in the foot...

When we wrote "Rich Client Programming: Plugging into the NetBeans Platform" (the 600 page must-read that is taking the New York bestseller list by storm), we wrote it in DocBook XML, using our own lightweight home-brewed tooling solution. I've blogged about this before and about how useful we found it. Tim (Boudreau) and Jesse (Glick) had created two NetBeans modules some time back and we simply installed them in some early build of 6.0 and hacked away at our chapters, then...

A cool pic from NetBeans Day 2007, San Francisco, the day prior to JavaOne. Left to right on the stage: Bob Beasley, father of the Dog Oral Reward Kit (D.O.R.K.) and James Gosling, father of Java: Below them, me. What am I doing? (In fact, what are we all doing there? What are we looking at? This could be a surreal caption competition. Or perhaps a "Spot the Ball" competition. Don't worry though, a competition comes up later in this blog entry.) I am demonstrating my...

In one of the blog entries I wrote during JavaOne, I mentioned that I'd bumped into NetBeans architect Pavel Buzek, who was playing around with JavaScript and the NetBeans APIs. Since JDK 6, it is possible to run JavaScript in the NetBeans IDE's editor. Just right-click in the editor when a JavaScript file is open, if you're running on JDK 6 or above, and you'll see a "Run" menu item. Now, with the stuff that Pavel Buzek showed me, however, you're also able to run the...

In the screenshot below, notice that there's a status bar. The status bar shows the latitude, longitude and elevation of whatever is under the cursor on the globe. Also, what is very useful is that you get a red blinking "Downloading" text, whenever images are being downloaded to fill out the current view. Have a look at the status bar below, so you know what I'm talking about, before I reveal the most interesting part about it: (By the way, notice how the image above is...