Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Ruth Kusterer..? Tinu..? Tori..? "Who are these people?" (As Seinfeld might exclaim in his typical Seinfeldian cry of anguish.) Well, worry no more. Here are two pics taken last night in a pub here in Prague where I hung out with some of my colleagues. Tori is the Managing Editor of www.netbeans.org. She's based in the US, as is David Botterill, who is the evangelist for the Visual Web Pack. David is working on a very interesting project, which will be revealed in the coming...

Many many moons ago (which turns out to be June 16, 2006), Wouter van Reeven (from Amis in Holland) and I started writing a tutorial for OpenOffice.org API on the NetBeans Platform. Wouter provided the OpenOffice.org API side of the story and I provided the NetBeans Platform side. That was a pretty cool document we worked on and we intended to try to publish it somewhere externally. However, the story kind of dwindled at some stage, because it became quite difficult to...

Thanks to the On the Margins guy, I came across this... and now I'm able to unleash my pics in a compact form at last! Flickr rocks, by the way. Didn't know nada about it until 15 minutes ago and already I basically have a slideshow together. (15 minutes ago I didn't even have the pics.) So here are chairs around the docs area, in a cool slideshow thingy. To see a caption for a picture, you need to click on the picture. Maybe there's a better way of setting that up that I...

I've been wanting to look at the Swing Application Framework for some time. Intuitively, I imagine there's a lot of overlap between that framework and the NetBeans Platform. The central message that the NetBeans Platform presents is: "Hey, Swing applications! Come and build yourself on top of me! I provide a framework that will make your life a lot simpler, you won't need to create the infrastructure of your application... because that's what I'm for!" Hmmm. That message...

There's lots of discussion in Lukas's blog and Roumen's blog about new icons that will be used in 6.0. Inevitably and unsurprisingly, some people like the new icons and some people don't. If we're going to change icons anyway, then I don't understand why we don't provide selectable sets of icons (and also let people register their own sets) instead. Then you'd be able to choose which set you like, for example the "Classic" set or the "Modern" set or "My Own Silly Set". The...

I corresponded with Usman, who is a software architect at a telecom company in London, today. Usman had written to one of the NetBeans mailing lists asking about the NetBeans Platform. I asked him a few questions and, after receiving his permission, decided to post the resulting correspondence as a blog entry: Me: Am I correct in understanding that you want to move an existing Swing application to the NetBeans Platform? Can you say something about the background of what...

I'm going to be in Bangalore from the 17th of this month, then spending 21st-23rd in Hyderabad for Sun Tech Days, speaking at NetBeans Day -- which is on the 23rd -- and returning to Bangalore for a few days after that. Then I'll be trying to combine small trips with wrapping up the NetBeans Platform book. So, is anyone out there either in Bangalore or Hyderabad? Or anywhere else in India? Would be nice to meet up and/or get some hints about where to go and what to see...

My JavaMail client now has a Navigator for the current folder's subject lines, with a double-click action that opens the related e-mail in the Swing browser and HTML editor. The toolbar displays the name of the currently selected subject line's sender. Here's the result: I was surprised how easy it was to create a Navigator. Actually, the Navigator displays a TopComponent, because that's what the getComponent() method returns. Here's the whole Navigator class: public class...

Lots of recent developments, over the past 2 or 3 weeks, in the NetBeans module (i.e., "plugin") area. Here's a few items that have crossed my path recently that I thought were interesting: Wade Chandler committed two new modules to the NetBeans sources, in contrib. Especially the second one sounds interesting: "It allows you to launch files in the default OS application. You can choose to open or edit the file in the default application.I wrote this module because I was...