Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Sometime ago I blogged about a module I was working on for integrating Jazzy Open Source Spell Checker into NetBeans. At the time, the spelling errors were shown in a window on the right of the IDE (click here to see it). That's not an ideal way of dealing with spelling errors. It would be better to mark them in the editor than to display them separately. So, since the last few days I've been learning about error annotations (org.openide.text.Annotation). As a result, my...

Remember the computer science students I met in Cairo, Egypt? (There's a picture of them here and I blogged about our meeting here.) They wanted to do their thesis on the NetBeans Platform but didn't know what to focus on, although they definitely wanted to extend NetBeans somehow. Well, they've just released the Beta version of.... Project Plethora! What is it? Well, in short... a designer and code generator for Looking Glass 3D applications. I got an e-mail this morning...

I've had the pleasure of interviewing Andreas Andreou (pictured above), who is the Tacos lead developer and a contributor to the Tapestry Framework. Readers of this blog will have seen a few mentions of him recently, especially in light of a lot of things I learnt from him about code completion. But the main subject of discussion in the interview is about the support that Andreas created in NetBeans IDE for Tapestry. He's open sourced the project at https://nbtapestrysupport.d...

In previous blog entries, I showed that you can use a web service to pull documentation into a code completion box's documentation section. (There's also a detailed tutorial on this subject here.) However, chances are that you don't want to use a web service, especially when you have no control over it. Therefore, the approach taken by the nbtapestrysupport project is quite useful. There, a Bundle.properties file stores the documentation, and the CompletionDocumentation.getTex...

I discovered something purely by chance yesterday (hurray for serendipity). Let's say you have this import statement: import java.io.BufferedReader; If you put the cursor in "BufferedReader" above and then press Alt-O, the IDE opens the "BufferedReader" source. No surprise there, right? The key binding Alt-O is "Go to Source" and so, when you put the cursor on the name of a class, and then press Alt-O, you see the source. However, what happens when you put the cursor on...

Yesterday I blogged about the tooltip that CompletionItem.createToolTipTask() can give you. However, in order to invoke that tooltip, you need to be inside the code completion box and then press Alt-P when an entry is selected. Wouldn't it be cool if you could get a tooltip without even opening the code completion box? Well, fortunately you can set a tooltip in the CompletionProvider, by using CompletionResultSet.setToolTip(). This particular tooltip is really powerful. It...

There's a handy class called CompletionDocumentation. That class, all on its own, controls the documentation section of a code completion box. The documentation section is, in the screenshot below, the lower part of the screenshot, which here displays the text "Word: were", with definitions of the word "were", retrieved from an online web service: In effect, the documentation section is a browser. It renders HTML tags. So, above you see a hyperlink for the word "were". When...

I have added a new section to the NetBeans Code Completion Tutorial. The section describes how to implement the scenario I blogged about yesterday. When you work through it all, you too will be able to call a web service to fill the code completion box. Obviously, all the shortcomings of web services are applicable here. For one thing, if the web service is down, or if the owner removes it, you have no more definitions in the code completion box. Also, you need to be online...

How cool is this?! Inside my code completion box, I now not only have words (i.e., not just 'boring' Java code, but actual words), but also all definitions. For example, here I type "and" and then... I see the word appear in the code completion box, together with its definition: Firstly, I should point out that everything I know about the lower part of the code completion box I learnt from Andreas Andreou from the nbtapestrysupport project. In that project, you'll find a Bundl...