Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

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...

The Coyote project on java.net aimed at bringing, amongst others, Groovy support into NetBeans IDE. The project is dead since the release of NetBeans IDE 5.5, but there's enough useful code in there for integration with the Schliemann-related code that I've blogged about recently. In fact, with a little bit of tweaking (mainly involving the throwing out of the syntax support in Coyote), one is left with a project template and file templates for Groovy, which, when combined...

Sometimes small changes have large consequences, unforeseen and, as a result, surprising. In Palette API and 6.0, Testing the Waters... (Part 1), I talked about the resolution of issue 90213. As a result, you can create palettes for existing editors, without changing the sources of the editor in question. The clearest illustration of this is that you can now create a module containing a palette and assign it to the Java MIME type, which means it appears when the Java editor...

A lot of things are simple in Schliemann (which is the brand new NetBeans approach for the declarative creation of editor features, as described on the project page here) or, at least, a lot simpler than before. Other things are still pretty hard. The hardest thing I've yet encountered in Schliemann is code folding. But that was already hard before, so there's no change there. :-) It is hard because you need a grammar, and the grammar has to cover everything in your file, not...

Some fun. I seem to have made a Groovy kind of editor... It has a 'Source' view and a 'Console' view. All of it is built on top of the Manifest Multiview sample, which illustrates one of the chapters in the forthcoming NetBeans Platform book. It does not use the unstable XML Multiview API, but just the standard one that's been in the NetBeans Platform forever. Below is my new Groovy editor in NetBeans IDE, with code that comes from Getting to Know Groovy, which I have found...

I've been trying to find tokens to exercise my newly acquired Schliemann skills on. Eventually, after investigating a variety of interesting scripting languages (including one called MUMPs, which would have made a cool subject line for a blog entry: "Schliemann Has Mumps"), I settled on regular expressions, because NetBeans engineer Martin Adamek has a regular expression tester on nbextras.org (Sandip has a regular expression checker there too). In other words, the tokens...

I've made some progress embedding the Groovy Console in NetBeans IDE 5.5. Before going into details, here's the current result: Before going into the remaining problems, let's first look at what it took to get to the current result. First, the good people at Groovy did the world a big favor by creating a single JAR file that includes everything needed for working with Groovy in Java. In the Groovy distribution, get embeddable/groovy-all-1.0.jar, and you're good to go....

An interesting thing to be aware of is that the NBS file type is itself defined in an NBS file. What does this mean? This means that you can brand the NBS file. Let's say, for example, that we don't like the syntax colors of NBS files. Here's how an NBS file looks by default: So, let's say that we want the syntax colors to be different. We could, as an end user, just go to the Options window and change the text/x-nbs MIME type's colors. However, let's make the change more...

To anyone who is not a programmer, programming is seen as a dry activity, comparable to filling out a tax form or applying for a visa. Fundamentally, it is typing after all, and it is typing code, which, compared to words, is not alive. Code cannot express human longing, cannot express hope and passion, does not have the vocabulary for pain, remorse and loss (unless you consider garbage collection a subset of loss). Of course, this is comparing apples with oranges. Code has...