Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

I'm busy working on organizing a tutorial that lets you create Masoud Kalali's Gmail Checker for NetBeans. (By the way, if you listen to this episode of Java Posse, you'll find that Tor Norbye mentions Masoud's module! He says, among other things, "If you want to live in your IDE, this brings you one step closer.") I'm learning quite a lot by writing this tutorial. One thing I've learnt is something I wondered about while writing the NetBeans Options Window Extension Module...

First, a picture of my log file: If you want your log files to look like this too (i.e, if you want XML instead of text in your log files), read on. The above screenshot is the result of JULI (java.util.logging) logging in Tomcat 5.5.9, which is bundled with NetBeans IDE 5.0. Before going further, a little bit of background reading on JULI: Enlightening thread on nbusers Java Logging API and How To Use It Logging in Tomcat Java Logging APIs So, this is how to set things up so...

By the way, if you want to create the above application yourself, see the Paint App Tutorial by Tim Boudreau. James, a new colleague of ours in the docs department, is busy updating and formatting Tim's tutorial so that it matches the style of our other tutorials. He's done a really good job and we should have the next revision of Tim's tutorial available soon. In the meantime... why not download NetBeans IDE 5.0 Beta 2 and take it for a spin?

I learnt two small but interesting things today about Struts, Tomcat, and NetBeans IDE 5.0. Both things are really quite small, but both are also really quite significant and interesting—at least to me. So, here are the two problems I had—I will not give you the solutions. Instead, if you know one or more of the solutions, please leave a message at the end of this blog entry (or write me an e-mail). In a few days, I'll leave the answers at the end of this blog entry, if...

In the entire time that I've been blogging, I don't think I've recommended anyone else's blog, even once. I don't even have a little list of 'recommended blogs', like most—maybe even all—other bloggers do. The reason I never did that is that I was afraid of excluding someone, then having to add them out of politeness, and then finding the list becoming really long and increasingly meaningless. And even within my blog entries themselves, I've only referred to individual blog...

In yesterday's instalment (and the one from the day before), all you ended up with was a (very simple) login form. But no application consists of only a login form. So, let's create something real with Struts—let's display some data from one of the PointBase databases that is bundled with the IDE. (By the way, the PointBase database server is also bundled with the IDE, together with the Tomcat Web Server that we'll be deploying to later.) And let's use a Struts datasource to...

Building on yesterday's quick introduction to Struts, I added a password field to the ActionForm Bean class and added it to the table in loginForm.jsp. Then I used the IDE to enhance the application with a lot of Struts functionality. The sections that follow show how to enhance the application by adding the following: Validation functionality.Syntax-level: Enhance the ActionForm Bean class to check whether the name and password fields in the loginForm.jsp are filled in. If...

NetBeans IDE 5.0 simplifies Struts. By selecting one single checkbox in the New Web Application wizard, all the Struts libraries are added to your project. In addition, you get the magical struts-config.xml file, which is where you register all the Struts functionality that you want to work with. Wizards are provided for the creation of the two categories of Struts classes—actionform beans and actions. Wizards are also accessible from within struts-config.xml, for...

Kind of a fun thing—I've added a menu item to the Projects window's pop-up menu. When I right-click in the Projects window (not on any of the nodes in the window, but in the window itself), I now see this addition: That could be a pretty useful thing for adding new actions that are applicable to projects. (Maybe an action that interacts with Roman's Project Packager, for example.) So, this is how I added the action (click to enlarge): But, the best part is that I discovered...