Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Today I was innocently working on my super useful Simpsons integration module (below is a screenshot of current status, which includes drag-and-drop, inline editing, and cool labels with different colors for selection and hovering)... ...when I suddenly, accidentally, moved the middle button (kind of a scrolly thing between the two click buttons) on my mouse. Imagine my surprise when my entire TopComponent suddenly zoomed bigger and bigger: And, when I moved the middle scrolly...

One of the nice things about the NetBeans Visual Library 2.0 is its in place editor. First some screenshots. Below, you see what happens when I double-click on a label—I can change the name of one of the Simpsons: Also, when I hover with the mouse over a label, it is highlighted in light blue; while when I select a label, it is highlighted in dark blue. So below I have selected "Al Bundy", while the mouse is hovering over "Peg": And not much coding was needed for this effect....

My first look at the NetBeans Visual Library 2.0 has been quite fun. Here's my personal little "Hello World" sample that I've been playing with and extending: Whenever you move one of the Simpsons, the connected arrows move along as well. Without any programming on my part! And the drag and drop is completely provided by the library as well. So, here I've moved Homer to the left and, as you can see, the connected arrows have moved too: The coding is pretty simple. You create...

This week's "Keyboard Shortcut of the Week" gets 10 out of 10 in the categories "Obscurity", "Wackiness", and "Hmmm. Not wild about it, but pretty cool anyway." So, you're in the source view of something that also has a design view. Which, basically, means you're in the source view of the Matisse GUI Builder. Or, possibly, you're in the source view of the web.xml Visual Editor. (Or, I guess, you could even be in the source view of your own MultiView API implementation.) Or...

The Matisse update pack, which I first referred to in yesterday's blog entry, has a very nice toy... "Preview Design", with a look and feel that you can register and select. In the Projects window, you can right-click a TopComponent (or other Swing containers, but since I'm mostly interested in TopComponents, that's what I'll focus on here) and select a look and feel: ...and then... immediately, without any programming or fuss on your part, you can see your GUI with the look...

I've never used the IDE's "Connection Mode" before, because I didn't understand how it worked and didn't have the time to look at the related documentation. But I remembered that Roumen has a cool Wink demo in his blog on this subject, so I looked that up and found it here. However, when I went to the IDE, to follow the steps in Roumen's demo, a really cool thing happened. Take a look... here, I clicked the "Connection Mode" button. As soon as I had clicked it, a lightbulb...

Not long ago I was talking to one of the NetBeans engineering managers and the discussion turned to web frameworks. In contrast to web/application servers, you can't say that an IDE "covers" web frameworks when you provide support for two or three of them. With web/application servers, if an IDE supports GlassFish/SJSAS, JBoss, WebLogic, and Tomcat (with WebSphere somewhere on the horizon), you can truly say that you've covered about 90% of your developer community. (Plus,...

...and wondering where to start? The NetBeans APIs let you interact with the NetBeans infrastructure, either to extend that infrastructure (to create, for example, new hyperlinks in the NetBeans editor) or to provide your own infrastructure for a separate application (such as the JFugue Music NotePad). The documentation group at NetBeans has launched a new concept, that of "learning trails". Each area of NetBeans (which includes its packs, such as Mobility), now provides a...

This week's keyboard shortcut of the week is... really cool. First, put your cursor right behind a method's open brace. That spot, right behind an open brace, is secretly a very special character. Take a look here: The cursor is on the character right behind the method's open brace. Nothing special, right? But now look at the method's closing brace. It is pink. That only happens when the cursor is right behind a method's open brace. Or the other way round... put the cursor...