Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Some months ago, when some of the Sun Java Studio Creator developers were in town (i.e., here in Prague), I went out for a few drinks with some of them. At some point, I mentioned that we had put together a NetBeans Server-Skeleton Plug-in Tutorial. When he heard this, one of them laughed and, I remember his response very clearly—he said: "Wow! How big is your audience?!" What he meant was that he didn't think there'd be many people out there interested enough in creating...

Let's say you want to send a super secret message somewhere, from within an application. A suitably secret message (because you're afraid of Ashton Kutcher or because you're worried that it might be uncool to think that Demi Moore is cool) might be: "Demi Moore is cool." How would you go about sending it? Let's try message-level web service security. And we'll use an IDE. Hmmm... which IDE shall we use. Let's try NetBeans IDE.Use wizards in NetBeans IDE 5.0 to create the 'Hi...

Until yesterday, my projects were just like everyone else's—a long list, sorted alphabetically: Now, however, thanks to a new module by Tim Boudreau (it's in CVS, but I don't know under what name), my life is much neater and simpler—I have folders where I can group related projects: Thanks a lot Tim!

While rewriting a Sun Education course ("DWS-4487: Developing Secure Java Web Services") to use NetBeans IDE, I must've come across every single unparseably bizarre error that the tiny warped minds of developers have conceived of. The one that takes the cake, as far as I'm concerned, is this one: Exception in thread "main" javax.xml.rpc.soap.SOAPFaultException: SOAP must understand error at com.sun.xml.rpc.client.StreamingSender._raiseFault(StreamingSender.java:528) ...

Some developers know exactly what they want when they're creating their application. They don't want to first use a project wizard to create their application and then use the Library Manager to select the libraries they need. For these people, wouldn't it be cool if all the libraries were to be available in the Frameworks panel? (Currently, this additional panel is only available in the Web Application wizard.) And, if you think of web frameworks as consisting of a library...

Here's something fun—create a web application with Struts (or JSF) support in NetBeans IDE 5.0. Then right-click the project, choose Properties, and go to the Frameworks panel in the Project Properties dialog box. You'll see a list of 'Used Frameworks' where the framework(s) you selected previously are listed. Now exit the Project Properties dialog box. Go to your web.xml file and make one tiny change to the servlet-class declaration. For example, just change one letter. Now...

While preparing the abstract of a session for JavaOne 2006, Petr Pisl—senior developer in the NetBeans J2EE team—introduced me to the WebFrameworkProvider class of the NetBeans APIs. (The NetBeans APIs enable you to extend the IDE. Plus, they enable you to build completely non-IDE related applications on top of the NetBeans core.) This class is really cool—it's really all you need for implementing the basics of a web framework in NetBeans IDE. My implementation doesn't do...

In the IDE, when you go to Tools > Palette Manager, you get two menu items—Swing/AWT Components and HTML/JSP Code Clips. Here's what the HTML/JSP Code Clips Palette Manager looks like: Now, let's say you've created your own palette (as I've done for the jboss-web.xml file and the Manifest.mf file, as shown in the previous few blog entries). How would you add the code snippets in your palette to the Palette Manager? At first I didn't understand it, then I looked in the layer.xm...

My support for Manifest files has expanded a bit—now there is syntax highlighting as well as a Component Palette with some (very basic) code snippets: The left margin of the screenshot looks a bit odd. That's because I've started working on code folding—so far with little success... By the way, there's a new tutorial on adding HTML code snippets to the Component Palette. It's very easy to do, as my previous blog entries have shown. Here's the complete tutorial: NetBeans Code...