Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

One of the OpenOffice.org applications is called Draw. It is a graphics package. Just like Writer and Calc, which I looked at in previous blog entries, you can incorporate Draw into your application, via the OpenOffice.org API. Here, for example, is a drag and drop interface for generating an organigram: When you click "Generate Organigram", the Draw application opens, showing you (in the case of the above design) the following organigram: There are really no secrets to this...

Using the principles discussed in yesterday's blog entry, you can quite easily extend the application built in the Asynchronous JAX-WS Web Service Client End-to-End Scenario tutorial. At the end of it, all your returned WSDL URL's could be hyperlinks, as shown here: To turn the tutorial application into the above, you'd need to change the JTextArea into a JEditorPane, so that you can assign the HTML Editor Kit to it, as discussed yesterday. Then you'd add a hyperlink...

In Showing a Module's HTML File in the IDE's Browser, I made the mistake of thinking that I was describing how to open an HTML file in the IDE's Swing browser. Instead, I showed how to open an HTML file in a JEditorPane. The problem with that approach, as described in that blog entry, is that hyperlinks in the page cannot be clicked and followed. They're visible as blue underlined text, but they can't be clicked. However, about a week ago, there was a discussion about this...

Michael Knight was "Knight Rider", a minor TV hero of the 80's, played by David Hasselhoff, who later ended up being famous in Baywatch and, somehow or another that I never figured out, Germany. He had a talking car called "Kitt" (Knight Industries Two Thousand). (By the way, Kitt's uptight voice was done by Higgins, Tom Selleck's uptight sidekick in "Magnum", which featured laconic, Hawaiian-shirted Magnum P.I., another minor TV hero of the 80's, a role that was so...

Using very similar principles to those outlined in recent OpenOffice.org API related blog entries, I now also have a spreadsheet generation functionality added to a very simple Swing application. Here's the Swing application: When you click the Generate Report button, assuming you have both radiobuttons selected (i.e., you can select either, both, or neither and depending on the choice, the most/least replied-to article is highlighted in a distinctive color), the...

This is my current favorite "wow, cool" thing in the NetBeans editor. It's really small, but really cool. This is how it goes... Normally, when you (at least, I) use code completion, as in for example this scenario... ...you would click with the mouse, or press Enter, to complete the code. The result is then as follows: In other words, you get the code you requested from the Code Completion box and the cursor lands in between the brackets. However, if—instead of pressing Enter...

The next steps in my OpenOffice.org generation function are to (a) set the background color of the header cells, (b) set the background color of every other row (for scanability), and, finally, (c) set the color and width of the borders of the cells in the table. Here's the result: By the way, this blog entry also describes, maybe even more interestingly, how to get the content of a Swing jTable into a text table in the OpenOffice.org Writer document. This is all made possible...

This is what my report looks like right now (same u.i. as before, so no point in including a screenshot of that; just look in yesterday's blog entry—the whole report below, without any post-processing, is generated when the "Report" button in my NetBeans Platform-based application is clicked): I'm finding the OpenOffice.org 1.1 Developer's Guide worth its weight in gold (and since it comes at 1047 pages, that's probably a fair amount of gold). A lot of the text formatting of...

Again with the help of Wouter (see yesterday's blog entry for details), I'm working on some more early experiments with the OpenOffice.org API. Here's how I've extended an application built atop the NetBeans Platform—data is retrieved from a Java DB database at start up and then, when the "Report" button is clicked, the first column in the application's table is written to a table in an Open Office Writer document: For a small taste of what's going on behind the scenes...