Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

In the series "Learning from Others", which provides interviews with NetBeans module developers from all around the world, about their key learnings, tips and tricks, and insights into NetBeans Platform development (see the bottom of the left sidebar on http://platform.netbeans.org/), a new one, with NetBeans C/C++ Pack developer Vladimir Voskresensky, will be published soon. In the interview, when asked if he has some tips and tricks for working with NetBeans, one of his...

When you look in the IDE's New File wizard, you might notice that many of the file categories (each of which provide templates of one kind or another) have their own "Java Package" item. Makes sense, because when you're working with, for example, the JUnit templates, you don't want to look around for the Java Package item, so it makes sense to keep it together with the JUnit templates in the JUnit category, as well as virtually every other category that needs it. But now...

The title theme of the upcoming German-language Javamagazin is... NetBeans! It will feature an interview with Jan Chalupa, the new NetBeans director, and Tim Boudreau, leading architect, theorist, evangelist, and presenter of the NetBeans Platform. There will also be articles on the IDE itself, as well as on the NetBeans Platform. Plus... enterprise application development with NetBeans. So if you're in Germany this Thursday, i.e., the 10th of August, note what the website...

I had a pretty rough time today, trying to work out how to reinterpret the EJB 3.0 Enterprise Beans tutorial, which was written for the Sun Java System Application Server, so that it would work for JBoss. It "should" work the same out of the box, but there are a few differences, for various reasons. The complete Java EE 5 narrative is center stage here in this tutorial. First, you create an EJB module that, in the case of JBoss, uses Hibernate by default for persistence....

Stan Aubrecht, NetBeans engineer and king of drag and drop, sent me a cool sample recently. When you install it, you see the following: Note: Here, you can drag items either from the palette or from a node in an explorer view, such as in the Projects window. The palette's DragAndDropHandler isn't used, so that the drag functionality is not limited to the palette. This means that, in your own implementation, you could exclude the palette completely and only provide drag and...

TreeTableViews (TTVs) have properties that are very easy to set. Click here to see a handy table with settable properties. Mostly they're about ordering columns in tables. When you specify that a column is sortable, a small arrow icon appears (and the column header text turns bold) when you click on the column header. For example, here the "Title" column is sortable and I've clicked it to indicate that I want it sorted and, lo and behold, the items in the column are...

I finally updated the samples in my NetBeans Update Center. I removed all the various modules that were there and replaced them with one single module that provides 15 NetBeans module samples. They all show some aspect/s of the NetBeans APIs. The modules are all built on NetBeans IDE 5.5 Beta 2. So, if you have that version of NetBeans IDE, you should have no problem installing and working with these modules (there are no guarantees or promises of any kind for any other...

Yesterday was the first week day since I started this blog, as far as I'm aware (outside of vacations), that I didn't blog! And that's because I spent the time I normally spend blogging on extending the MP3 Manager a bit. Now multiple files can be opened (thanks to late night e-mails to and from Pierre Matthijs) and the properties display correctly (thanks to local super engineer Andrei Badea). So, from a user interface perspective, the result is currently as follows: I'm...

To work a bit more with the org.openide.explorer.view.TreeTableView class, I've been working on building a rich-client application that integrates the de.ueberdosis.mp3info library. This library can read information from MP3 files, such as the artist's name and the song's title. I implemented these as properties (via the org.openide.nodes.PropertySupport class), so that I could use the TreeTableView exactly as it is meant to be used (instead of, as yesterday, as a glorified...