Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

NetBeans Day in Johannesburg is over! Wow, what a success: full room, plus/minus 150 participants, and one presentation on top of another by Sang, Chuk, and myself. The day started with James Gosling's keynote. He gave a very nice overview of the usefulness of tools and the choice made by NetBeans to provide sophisticated development support out of the box for all standard Java technologies. Then I followed with a presentation called: "What Makes NetBeans The Best?" It...

The Johannesburg Sun Tech Days are over! Tomorrow is NetBeans/Solaris Day. I have a feeling that the Sun Tech Days were a great success. 1000 or so attendees can never be a bad thing. So many were interested in NetBeans! One truly fantastic thing about the Sun Tech Days is that the Sun technology evangelists who do the presentations all, very naturally, use NetBeans IDE for their demonstrations. How cool is that? I mean, of course, what else would they be using? But still, it...

I've been sharing the "Sun Developer Tools" booth with two great guys: Tom Gryder (Sun Product Marketing Manager) and David Botterill (Java Studio Creator Evangelist). We were pretty swamped throughout the day. However, in a brief lull while a session was in progress, Tom said that the interest in NetBeans was really very high. We've been handing out free NetBeans IDE 5.0 CDs and Sun Java Studio Creator 2 CDs (the latter also contains Java Studio Enterprise 8). I really wish...

I worked through GUI Building in NetBeans IDE 5.0 for the very first time today. Now I really have a good understanding, for the first time, what all the fuss is about. It's all pretty cool and so smooth. Here's the result I ended up with at the end: Everything pretty much worked out as I had expected, but I was surprised by the following two really nice details, which make an already great tool truly excellent: Firstly, when you want to put a component between two other ones,...

After I blogged about the best feature of the upcoming NetBeans IDE 5.5, a couple of other bloggers sat up and took notice. Rightly so, because the work that has gone into integrating Java EE 5 development into NetBeans IDE for the upcoming 5.5 release is really compelling. Especially when combined with the state-of-the-art Glassfish server, of course. Two bloggers whose responses were particularly enthusiastic (yet enthusiastic in a down to earth, common sense kinda way)...

While no doubt reassuring to the manically paranoid, neither the pilot's revelation that one is traveling "in a south easterly direction from Amsterdam", nor his disclosure that at some point one will find oneself "over Cyprus, Libya, and Chad", is worth being pulled out of one's Nabokov ("The Real Life of Sebastian Knight", pg.42) for, especially considering that one is en-route to South Africa, a destination which requires nothing more than the slimmest grasp of geographic...

NetBeans IDE 5.5 will totally redefine the word "productivity". I mean, forget wimpy little bits of code, pretty little samples, and obsequious hints and suggestions. Think big. How big? Well, how big can you think? That's how big, plus a little bit of extra bigness added on top. Without any coding whatsoever, you can pull all the data in your database into a Java EE 5 (i.e., standards-based) application. And what kind of application? A little simple one that just shows...

Click this link, download the NBM file, install it in NetBeans IDE 5.0, and you will see this in your New Project wizard:

From now onwards you'll be able to drag a web service's operations and drop them in whatever file the client uses for interacting with the service. For example, here a JSP page is used. I just dragged the "add" node with the mouse from the Projects window and dropped it in the Source Editor... and all the code you see highlighted below is the code that appeared when I did the drop: The same is possible in Java classes, such as servlets. Get this functionality from the...