Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Currently you can't create an HTML file in a Java package in a web application. (See Issue 64869. Workaround: Create it somewhere else and then move it into the Java package of your choice.) This is not a problem for anyone, except those using NetBeans IDE to develop Wicket applications. (Wicket expects the HTML file to be in the same location and bearing the same name as the Java source file that defines the components rendered by the HTML file.) To circumvent this problem...

When you use the IDE to create a wizard, there are a few panels provided by the IDE that you can reuse, instead of creating everything from scratch yourself. For example, this panel is used over and over (all of the IDE's file wizards have it), for setting the name and location for a to-be-created file: Instead of creating the above panel yourself, use the following steps to reuse it: Create a module project and then add wizard files (use the 'Wizard' file type in the...

I did a presentation at the JFall conference yesterday. My presentation was called Developing in Java with NetBeans IDE 5.0: Quick and Easy. My session was in the afternoon. In the morning I attended several interesting sessions—Simon Ritter on Sun SPOTs (ending with a cool demo with sensors), Eelco Hillenius and Martijn Dashorst on Wicket, and Jos Warmer on OCL. I learnt a lot from these sessions and not just about the technology being presented—I noticed that there...

I'm going to be at the NlJug's JFall conference on Wednesday. Here's the official summary of my session: Developing in Java with NetBeans IDE 5.0: Quick and EasySometimes life is a lot simpler than it seems. The complexity of, for example, J2EE and SOA should not be underestimated -- but an IDE can simplify a whole bunch of otherwise tricky things. Did you know, though, that NetBeans, developed in Prague, is actually a lot more than an IDE? It is actually also a platform on...

In Dutch, when you say 'er komt veel bij kijken', you mean something like: "There's a lot of stuff that comes around for a look." You really need to be on your toes when you first start working with this framework, but the more you get into it, the more you realize that Wicket gives you a lot more than just (a) freedom from all those XML configuration files (like in Struts and JSF) and (b) a separation of concerns (because someone could be working completely independently on...

This is what the Toolbars submenu looked like in NetBeans IDE 4.1: And this is what you see in NetBeans IDE 5.0: The difference? Notice the Customize menu option. Click it. You see all the toolbar buttons in a dialog box called 'Customize Toolbars'. On the face of it, there's nothing you can do with these buttons—right-click any of these buttons and nothing happens. No contextual menu. But, try this: click New Toolbar and then type a name for your toolbar in the New Toolbar...

Today Ludo wrote (here) about a Google toolbar that he added to NetBeans IDE—in only 16 minutes. Of course, he used the new plug-in module development functionality, including the Action wizard. In his own words (in an e-mail to me): "The wizard allows you to tell where the action is going. I picked the NetBeans toolbar only, and used the positioning editor from the wizard. Then I coded the action: I overwrote the getToolbarPresenter() method to return a real Swing panel, not...

I never had the Hibernate JAR files until a few days ago. And I didn't download them from the Hibernate site. And NetBeans doesn't bundle the Hibernate JARs. And they aren't available from the NetBeans Update Center. So how did they get into my Library Manager (click to enlarge)? Well, there's a very cool wizard—the J2SE Library Descriptor wizard—which is one of the 6 fantastic new file-level wizards in NetBeans IDE 5.0 (click to enlarge): When you use this wizard, you can...

When you use the Wizard wizard to create files for a dynamic wizard—because you want the user to be able to skip steps or to branch off to a subset of the wizard steps—one of the files created for you subclasses WizardDescriptor.InstantiatingIterator. This is the class that you use to define what the next step in the wizard will be, depending on the choices made by the user in the current and/or previous step. But a subclass of WizardDescriptor.InstantiatingIterator is alsocr...