Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

In How to Become Helpless in 5 Minutes (Part 1), I blogged about how you can easily exclude helpsets provided by other people's plug-in modules from your application. I guess this is not something you'd be concerned about if you're using the IDE—but what if you're creating a rich-client application (i.e., a Swing application) on top of the NetBeans Platform? Do you really want to include helpsets that explain how to create, for example, web services in the IDE? I doubt it. So...

So, I have this problem where the popup menu in my custom window component's (i.e., a topcomponent) JEditorPane doesn't show an activated menu item for the action I registered in the layer.xml file (below, you see Edit Music String greyed out, while it isn't greyed out when I open a file that uses the same MIME type in the NetBeans editor, as shown yesterday): So, following Sandip's advice (see comments at the end of yesterday's blog), I went here. I followed the...

This quiz consists of one question and the prize is that you will be "the world's greatest NetBeans plug-in module developer" for one whole day. The question is: Why is the "Edit Music String" menu item in the NetBeans editor's popup menu (left side below) activated, while if I call up the pop-up menu in the JEditorPane (on the right side below), the same menu item is greyed out? (And your answer can't be: "Because you need to add something or other to your TopComponent's...

I've been working on adding line numbers to the MIDI Editor, which is implemented in a JEditorPane. I guess I could've saved myself a lot of trouble if I used the NetBeans editor instead, but I wanted to see if it was possible—i.e., how much of the NetBeans editor can I provide in a JEditorPane? Well, here's the result, thanks to this helpful document: As you can see, I don't have syntax highlighting in the JEditorPane anymore (compare it to yesterday's blog entry to see the...

The MIDI Editor that I'm building (see yesterday's blog entry) is providing a great opportunity to learn about syntax highlighting in the IDE. There's a tutorial on this subject, but this is the first time that I've actually tried it out on something other than Manifest files (which is the use case in the tutorial). I've discovered that it is reallyeasy to create syntax highlighting, except for the creation of the tokens and making sure that the right element is matched to...

I've built a very simple editor plugin module for NetBeans (although the editor could very easily also be a standalone application) that produces files that conform to the MIDI Specification. Laying the basis of this editor was incredibly simple—thanks to the wonderful JFugue, which is an absolutely transparent Java API for Music Programming, in combination with the NetBeans IDE's plug-in module development support. Among other cool features, the JFugue API provides a very...

I solved the problem that I blogged about yesterday. The problem, in a nutshell, is that I am too lazy to manually create JavaHelp map IDs for all the Javadoc that I want to see in my JavaHelp viewer. To automate the process, I'm now using DOM parsing. (By far the most helpful on-line resource, that explains everything and is very clear, including understandable code samples, is in Red Squirrel Reflections.) So what happens now is this—if no map ID is found for a MultipartId (...

I've extended the plug-in module that I blogged about two days ago. There, I was able to select a Java keyword in the editor and then display a help topic specifically for that keyword. My implementation was kind of cheating—the selected word was determined to be a Java keyword purely based on whether a map id had been created for it in the JavaHelp map file. My extension to the plug-in module is a bit more "honest": it looks at whether the word under the cursor (a.k.a....

I didn't realize, until yesterday, that the NetBeans APIs provide a wide range of descriptions for simple communication with the user. For example, in the code below, a small dialog box with an input line (thanks to the NotifyDescriptor.InputLine class) appears and, depending on the user's response, your code can branch off in an appropriate direction. In this case, the getInputText() method is used to test whether the correct answer is given. So, when the action is invoked...