Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

The samples for the book Rich Client Programming: Plugging into the NetBeans Platform are now available... in the 6.0 Development Update Center: Hence, you need to start up some 6.0 IDE build (e.g., a milestone or a daily build), since these register this update center. Install from the update center and notice that the Samples category for NetBeans Plug-in Modules has been populated with many new samples: In the help set, you'll find a new topic describing each of the samples...

For the 6.0 release of NetBeans IDE, in the category "Gee, that'll come in handy", an honorable mention goes to.... drum roll... the "Find in Projects" dialog box... ...which will transmogrify itself into the "Find/Replace in Projects" dialog box: Hurray!

Since a few weeks, it's been possible to add new nodes to an existing NetBeans project type's logical view. Thanks to Milos Kleint, who created this functionality, I found out how to implement it. Take the steps below, as a kind of "hello world" experience.Create a new project called "foo" with code name base "org.netbeans.foo". In the layer, specify where you want the node to appear, i.e., which project you want to extend. <folder name="Projects"> <folder...

The start of a visual view on top of a JavaHelp toc file: My starting point for creating this visual view was to generate the beans for traversing the XML file. I used the generator described yesterday, of which I uploaded a new version (1.1) to the plugin portal. Several bugs are fixed. Plus, when you hover the mouse over a checkbox, you'll see a tooltip with the Schema2Beans parameter that is executed if the checkbox in question is selected. That could be quite useful. So,...

I followed Toni's 5 part Schema2Beans tutorial in his blog today (part1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5). Toni wrote that tutorial all the way back in October. At the time I looked at it, but had no idea what "Schema2Beans" was, nor why I would want to deal with it. In short, Schema2Beans is a NetBeans utility for generating JavaBeans for traversing XML elements and attributes that are governed by a DTD or Schema file. And why would you want to do that? You would want to do...

A simplistic start to creating a multiview editor for the xwork.xml file: Most of it works, but there are several bugs to fix. An editor such as this only makes sense when (a) all elements/attributes are exposed and (b) no bugs remain. So those are the two things I'm striving for. Want to create a multiview editor for an XML file too? The principles of getting started are easy. Here are some resources: NetBeans: schema2beans library - User Documentation Toni Epple's blog has...

I worked out how to put the xwork.xml file in the Configuration Files node, by looking at how it is done for Struts, and (for the first time) implemented WebFrameworkProvider.getConfigurationFiles. This is the result: The only purpose of the Configuration Files node is that it provides a centralized location for all configuration files, which must first be found somewhere else, after which they are copied (programmatically, by the module that provides them) to...

I've added a few things to the NBWebWorkSupport module. First, I've put most of the samples from the 2.2.4 WebWork distribution into the New Project wizard as samples: For example, the ShoppingCart sample is pretty cool. Here's how it looks in the Projects window: Just run it and it deploys (because the module registers the applicable JARs in the Library Manager) straight away, with this result: In addition, there are also two file templates, one creates a simple 'Hello World'...

For the NBWebWorkSupport project, I need highly versatile menu items, for registering/deregistering Actions in the xwork.xml configuration file. They need to meet the following requirements: First, they need to appear on Java nodes, but only for projects that support WebWork. This requirement, and its solution, was discussed in Show/Hide Menu Items Based on Deployment Descriptor Content. Second, the menu item for deregistering a Java class's Actions needs to be enabled only...