Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

I don't like the term "module suite project". I think it is confusing, at least partly because it covers two different use cases—(1) you have a set of related modules that need to work together as a unit (such as the GMail Checker), (2) you want to create an application on the NetBeans Platform. It is an especially confusing term for newcomers to all of this, who understandably ask: "Where do I begin?!" There are no clear indicators in the IDE that tell you when you are...

I got an e-mail from Gregg (who recently developed a cool NetBeans module for adding HTML link tags to text in the NetBeans HTML editor, read about it here). Gregg wrote in response to my recent blog entry Exorcising NetBeans From Your NetBeans Application. This is his question: I hate to be so dense, but I'm having trouble figuring this out: "So, since these icons are set in core/startup, you can just override them by adding them, with the same name, to the location that...

I've been a technical writer for 10 years. In those 10 years I've learnt at least 10 things (which means one thing per year, yay) about working with developers. Here they are in no particular order. Ten things I've learnt that any other technical writer might also find useful when working with developers:Do attend their meetings if possible (unless they really don't want you, but then find out why that is the case and if it is a valid reason and not just because you smell...

In What One Year Of Blogging Has Done For Me, I mentioned having been invited to join a meeting of the Sun Java System Application Server User Experience group. The reason for my invitation was the complaining I had done in this blog about usability aspects of the Sun Java System Application Server! How cool is that. My complaints were basically that startup time is slow, that the speed of web app deployment to Tomcat is unbeatable, that connection pooling in JBoss is...

The final stage of creating a NetBeans Platform application is removing everything that is even vaguely reminiscent of NetBeans. You don't want people to go: "Hey, your app reminds me of that great IDE called NetBeans!", do you. So, this is all about surface-level stuff, i.e., everything you're about to read is about making superficial changes to your application so that it looks unique and special, rather than derivative (which, in all honesty, is what it is). So, here's the...

If you go to http://platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/ (or, in fact, anywhere on http://platform.netbeans.org), you'll see in the left navigation bar, right at the bottom, a section called "Learning from Others". Towards the end of last year, Sandip and Tomwere interviewed about their module development experiences and their interviews were linked to that spot in the left navigation bar. Two more have been added in the last two days—Edgar Silva (from Brazil, in the first pic...

Alex Lam left some interesting comments at the end of my blog entry yesterday, about his hope that with rich-client applications increasingly taking off, there'd be a growing space for generic NetBeans modules, rather than IDE-specific ones. For example, instead of creating modules that enhance the NetBeans Source Editor (which would only benefit NetBeans IDE), our module development work can increasingly focus on providing modules for allapplications based on the NetBeans...

I was up until 4.00 this morning, migrating the syntax highlighting from my initial implementation to the new drag-and-drop JFugue interface. Before doing that, I migrated the "Save" functionality. Now you can save the music string in the Editor to a Midi file (all I had to do was add three lines of code that work with the JFugue API). Below, you see the "Save" menu item selected: As you can see, I am using the Napkin Look & Feel by Alex Lam and Ken Arnold (as promised in the...

I feel a little bit like that dude who invented the telephone. So, hurray, my Music NotePad works! My very first application built on the NetBeans Platform. Check it out—now, when you drop an item from the palette on the music sheet, the related note and duration are added to the editor. Same for the instruments—just click a button and the instrument is added to the editor. (Note that now there's a wider selection of instruments, made available by a scroll deal.) Then, when...