Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

I've just finished updating the NetBeans Project Sample Plug-in Tutorial. I basically had to delete 50% of the previous version and replace the text with two screenshots -- because there's now a wizard that does all of the work for you. It's the new Project Template wizard, which makes NetBeans projects available as project samples in the New Project wizard. (By the way, if you want to create a new project template, you could also use this wizard to create its basis. Then you...

In yesterday's blog entry I felt all pleased because I'd worked out how to set the proxy host and port number for NetBeans J2SE projects. This is what I did:Create my.properties file in my application's root directory. Add proxy host and port number to the my.properties file: http.proxyHost:webcache.ukhttp.proxyPort:8080 Right-click the project, choose Properties, click Run, and type my.properties in the Arguments field. Add this to the project's main class: if (args.length...

Regular readers of this blog know that I've been eagerly awaiting the availability of web service support in NetBeans J2SE projects. The experiments I've done recently in the web service area have all focused on web applications. Yesterday Milan Kuchtiak, currently the main developer in Prague responsible for web service developments, made a big commit to trunk -- exactly what I had been hoping for for a while now -- web service support in the J2SE area. "Now I'll be able to...

When I wrote How to setup a basic Struts project using NetBeans IDE 4.0, I was quite amazed at how much smoother Struts integration had become since NetBeans 3.4. I mean, of course I expected improvements and so on, but I didn't realize, until writing the article, the extent to which Struts support in NetBeans had advanced. NetBeans IDE 4.1 stayed the same for Struts -- no changes were made. But the next release is going to provide a problem though -- Struts (andJSF) will be...

They're drafts, but they're pretty solid nonetheless... two new tutorials that explain (step-by-step, including code and a downloadable sample) how to consume web services. Part 1 is very simple -- little more than a quick start guide. Part 2 goes into a lot more detail, looks at a lot of the nuts and bolts (but only as far as you need to know about them) and leaves you with a friendly front-end that interacts with a spellcheck web service. Consuming Web Services in NetBeans...

...this is an example of what he would've written: Two web services are involved in creating the above output -- a web service that retrieves Shakespeare quotations (WSDL) and a web service that translates from English to Pig Latin (WSDL). I used NetBeans IDE 4.1 to consume the web services, which means that my complete ignorance of SOAP was not an obstacle -- a wizard did most of the work and all I had to do was add some code to process the data returned from the web...

Something I discovered yesterday is how easy it is to add code completion functionality to any XML file. Say, for example, you work a lot with datasource configuration files for JBoss. It's really easy to set things up so that, while typing, a little drop-down such as the following appears to suggest tags to use: To create that list, all you need is a DTD file. Code completion for XML files is based on the DTD file declared in the second line of the XML file. But, there's...

Check out the cool palette that makes my JSP and HTML life so much easier. I found it in a NetBeans IDE Dev build yesterday, (i.e., it is not in NetBeans IDE 4.1, but in a development build for the next release, which you can download and try out here). The palette opens automatically when you open a JSP file or an HTML file in the Source Editor. Then you drag the code snippet of your choice into the page. Next, a dialog box opens and you can define the most common...

At the end of Declarative MIME Type Resolvers, NetBeans IDE, and Shakespeare, I ended up with several XML files, each containing either successful or failed returns from a web service that retrieves Shakespeare quotations. Thanks to declarative MIME resolvers, each successful return had a William Shakespeare icon, while each failed return came with an Alfred E. Neuman icon. The final screenshot of that blog entry shows the Source Editor, with one tab per file, with the name...