Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Let's say you have some programming language for which you want to create a drag-and-drop code generator. What's the best of these in the world? The award winning Matisse GUI Builder, of course. Why spend days, weeks, and months creating a new GUI Builder, if one already exists? Currently, Matisse isn't built to be extended or customized. (Hopefully it will in the future, so that Ruby and Groovy programmers, for example, will be able to use it to create their GUIs.) So,...

One of the many esoterically ongoing discussions in the Swing world is that of "The Missing Close Button on JTabbedPanes". (To see a selection of these discussions, and various solutions, click here and you'll find yourself in Google, with all the returns for "jtabbedpane close button".) Even in this blog you'll find discussions on this topic. In JDIC Browser on the NetBeans Platform, I discuss various approaches to solving this problem. But... guess what? I was browsing...

One of the underheralded changes (or, even, unheralded) in NetBeans IDE 6.0 is that one used to be able to expand a Java source file in the explorer views, in order to see the related methods and fields, as shown below: In 6.0, this will no longer be possible. There'll be a node for the Java source file, and nothing else. Same for other files that can be expanded in the Navigator. So, this is how you'll have to work with Java files instead: In other words, the thinking seems...

I'm beginning to investigate the rewriting of Matisse for Groovy. What is abundantly clear, thus far, is that it will be impossible to support both Matisse for Java and Matisse for Groovy in the same NetBeans IDE. However, I suspect that SwingBuilder users (i.e., Groovy programmers) are not interested in programming straight Swing simultaneously with SwingBuilder, so that's okay. The biggest problem is not the rewriting of the templates (e.g., there's a JFrame template that...

My first explorations of how to provide code folding in NetBeans IDE for Groovy, via Schliemann. Two pictures before the journey begins. In this blog entry, I'm going to look at code folding for comment blocks in Groovy (although, I suspect that there may be some default recognition and handling of comment blocks in Schliemann). In the first picture, you see the expanded code fold: And here it is closed, within the context of other code folds, showing that the content of the...

Let's say you wanted to create this GUI: If you were to sketch this out quite roughly in pseudo code, the content and layout would basically be this: frame (title:'Demo') { menuBar { menu('File') { menuItem 'New' menuItem 'Open' } } panel { label 'Label 1' slider() comboBox(items:['one','two','three']) } } frame.show() Anyone, regardless of their insight into programming, would be able to come up with...

In Breathing Life into a Dead Coyote (Part 1), I stated my intention to commit the Schliemann code I've been working on to an upgraded version of the Groovy support module on Coyote. Well, today I did just that. So as not to mess up other things on Coyote, I created a separate directory and put everything in there. By "everything", I mean that I started with the 5.0 version of Groovy, opened the suite in my development build of 6.0, built everything, threw away stuff that...

The world is divided into two groups of people—those who use the mouse and those who use the keyboard. "Aren't you overlooking the very large group of people who don't use either one, because they don't have a computer in the first place?" Well, those people can also be divided into two groups—those who wish they were using a mouse and those who wish they were using a keyboard. OK? Let's not get side tracked. The second group of people—those who either use a keyboard...

Revision 1.12 of PaletteItemNode.java, performed in response to issue 97812, allows icons in palette items to come from external files. This may seem a less than exciting fix, however look at the following scenario, which is precisely what I had in mind when creating issue 97812 (by the way, in today's build, I couldn't get the text/x-java content type to work, probably a temporary glitch): You can now, for the first time, make use of the palette item DTD to let the user...