Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

System options in NetBeans IDE are traditionally provided by extending the NetBeans API's System Option class. However, this class is being rewritten. Or, in fact, the whole approach to system options is being reappraised. At the same time, though, users are creating modules that need options to be set. In some cases, this NetBeans API class is still being used even while it is being rewritten (planned for NetBeans 6.0, so still some time away). For example, Alex...

Jaroslav Pospisil and Milan Kuchtiak, two of my NetBeans colleagues, recently wrote a tutorial that describes how a Java SE application (i.e., a non-web application) can asynchronously communicate via JAX-WS with a web service. In this particular case, it consumes the eSynaps Web Service Search service. This service searches the Internet for web services. It gives you ASMX/WSDL locations ("or at least references to them"). The point of the tutorial is to show how...

Every week the NetBeans docs team here in Prague holds a workshop where we look at some specific area of our work without getting distracted by discussions about day to day activities. This gives us a chance to find out what other writers in the team are working on (there's so much going on that it is sometimes hard to know what someone else is doing and difficult to see, without a workshop, where one writer's work interlinks with what another writer is doing). So a few...

...find that you're in the middle of writing some very complex Java code... in... an... HTML file. Either you didn't sleep much or there's some other reason. Wouldn't it be cool if you could, in this admittedly bizarre corner case scenario, change the extension from ".html" to ".java" inside the IDE? Well, now you can... This is the performAction method in a CookieAction class that is registered in the layer.xml file under Editors/Popup (so that all files can change their...

This is not intuitive at all. Someone had to explain it to me twice. Probably this will be better to demonstrate via Wink or something like that, but I haven't yet learnt how to use those tools. So, this is what you do:Drag JTabbedPane from Component Palette onto Design View: Drag JPanel onto JTabbedPane: Make sure the whole JTabbedPane is selected (and not the JPanel inside of it): Drag another JTabbedPane until you see the orange dashed outline below: Then drop it. You'll...

Made a lot of progress implementing the iText API. I'm trying to use as much of its functionality as possible. Here's how the Options panel now looks (I ended up dedicating a special panel to it, although it should probably be accessible via a "Print to PDF" menu item under the File menu, to mirror how it works for HTML files): By the way, everything above works as one would expect (in other words, it is not just a pretty screenshot). Because the Options panel is quite hard...

There's a lot you can learn from code completion. With this iText API that I've been looking at, I didn't need any documentation to discover the basic functionality that the API makes available (especially since, like most semi-literate computer users, I know what kind of features PDF writers make available and was therefore able to map the methods I saw to the functionality I knew about already): Looking at the above two screenshots, and the methods that appear to be...

I've set things up so that now, by default, the PDF that you create via iText (using a menu item in the NetBeans Editor) is created in the same folder as where the original document is found. So, here I've created a PDF file for a selection from the CreatePDF.java file: However, if the PDF Creation Folder is set (as explained in yesterday's blog entry), then that folder overrides the default folder. If you want to see the code that makes this possible, click hereto get a PDF...

After downloading Jens Trapp's NB-Tidy module (discussed here) (by the way, I recently met Jens at NetBeans Day in San Francisco) to work out how his JFileChooser works, studying Masoud Kalali's option implementation (described here) (I used this implementation because everyone I've ever spoken to warned me against using System Options, these are going to be replaced and shouldn't be used, learnt, or taught), and getting some suggestions from NetBeans engineer Andrei Badea,...