Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

There are a few 'holy grails' in the NetBeans APIs. These are API classes that, once you've successfully implemented them, you sit back and go: "Wow. That was tough, I haven't slept for three days, but now it is finally done and the result is really cool." One of these is definitely the MultiView API. Another one is the Explorer API and, specifically, the org.openide.explorer.view package. On Tom Wheeler's NetBeans Site, you'll find the only example of this package (that I...

An application based on the NetBeans Platform that does not extol the many virtues of Marilyn Monroe cannot truly be said to be complete. (In the middle of that sentence, I suddenly realized that the chances are fairly considerable that no one has ever written that sentence before. Or, probably, even had that thought.) Allow me to explain. Here's a new window which every NetBeans Platform application (including NetBeans IDE itself) should have: Note: The list above is...

I got an e-mail from Kai Tödter at Siemens this morning, with this question (among others): "Is there an online article how to include and use the AutoUpdate in own applications?" Well, there is now... here it is. It starts with the assumption that you have nothing at all. At the end, you have an empty application (ready for Matisse and the other cool tools in the IDE), but including functionality provided by NetBeans IDE's Update Center module. Read on, if this is...

Seattle, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Prague, London, Hyderabad, Kuala Lumpur, Atlanta, St. Petersburg, Sao Paulo, Mexico City... what do these cities have in common? Well, they'll all be visited in the next edition of the NetBeans World Tour, starting in September and ending next year May. To celebrate, here's a pic I got from Danilo Costa in Brazil (maybe something like this should be on the front of our next NetBeans World Tour CDs or on some posters): And, if you want...

Evan Summers describes how to set up Java Web Start in NetBeans IDE 5.0 and I've been trying to get it to work for an application that integrates OpenOffice.org. The application itself is very simple (since this is just an experiment): So, you specify the location of your OpenOffice.org executable. (Also successfully tested for Star Office 8 and Star Office 7). A default value (valid for my environment but not necessarily for yours) is filled in for you. Then you click one...

Last week the Music NotePad I was working on had notes that look like this: But, since an hour, the notes are much improved: Not only that, but notice that there's now also a 16th note! And, what you can't see is that a bunch of under-the-hood functionality has been fixed. And that's all because... ...Pierre Matthijs, from Belgium, subscribed to the nbjfuguesupport open source project on dev.java.net, which is where I've open sourced the Music NotePad. And he's been very...

I've blogged about the iText API several times. (I like the API so much that I even created the basis of a NetBeans module for it and open sourced it at https://nbitextsupport.dev.java.net/.) At the same time, I've been looking into Jasper Reports. Recently a great article, by Craig Conover and Marina Sum, called "Integrating and Using JasperReports in NetBeans" was published. I worked through it and found the result pretty powerful. (Just make sure that javac runs from the...

The first presentation I did for NetBeans was on 12 October 2005, at the NL-JUG's JFall Conference in Holland. It was pretty terrible. I think the main problem was that I tried to cover waaay too much material. I thought that by covering a lot of material, it would be interesting for a wider range of participants. However, it all ended up being pretty chaotic. One thing I learnt there was to focus on a very specific part of the product and to really try and go into some...

My 2nd (i.e., last) day in Munich was productive from start to finish. First, I joined John Pampuch at the Siemens JavaTalks conference, which ended at lunch time. When I saw Kai Tödter, he told me that he'd seen yesterday's blog entry and had sent it around to all the other conference attendees (so, if you're reading this, Siemens people: "Hello from Prague and thanks for the good time in Munich!"). (He said he especially liked the comments at the end about the quality of...