Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Once I'd worked out how to retrieve Shakespeare's wise words from a web service (see Friends, Romans, Countrymen... for details), I thought the next logical step would be to send a returned Shakespeare quotation onwards... to a web service that would translate it for me. After all, that would demonstrate not only a scenario that makes use of multiple web services within one application, but is also a pretty worthwhile endeavour in and of itself. So -- again within seconds,...

Happily, my discovery of a simple feedreader web service coincided with my discovery of the NetBeans RSS feed. So, I used NetBeans IDE 4.1 to create a web application, right-clicked the project node in the Projects window, selected the New Web Service Client template in the New File wizard and then used it to generate a web service client from the feedreader web service's WSDL file. I then used the New Servlet template in the New File wizard to create a servlet, right-clicked...

To illustrate how J2SE projects work in NetBeans IDE, an Anagram Game is included as a sample in the New Project wizard. This is what it looks like: When you work through the NetBeans Anagram Game Plug-in Tutorial, you learn how to make the Anagram Game available as a NetBeans plug-in. However, whether or not you have the game available as a plug-in, at some point you want to try it out... only to find that your brain is too tiny to unscramble the anagram. The mentally...

There's a cool web service (click here) that returns Shakespearean quotations to clients that send it appropriate search strings. For example, I type this in my client (click to enlarge): And I get this in return (click to enlarge): Thanks to NetBeans IDE, creating the client (from the running web service, described by the freely available WSDL file) is as simple as clicking through a wizard (and then manually coding the JSP page). However, there are two tricky bits...

I've come across a pretty interesting web service. It extracts all the URLs from a given web page. This is where I found it: http://www.atomic-x.com/xmlservices/HyperlinkExtractor.asmx It's implemented in exactly the same way as yesterday's web service. This is the interesting part of the servlet's processRequest method: String url = request.getParameter("url");out.println("<b>URL:</b>");out.println(url);out.println("<p><b>Extracted URLs:</b>");String[] s =...

NetBeans IDE has taught me a lot, but not that there's another Prague. You would've thought that one would be more than enough. Well, here's the proof -- thanks to a web service that Lukas Jungmann helped me with, I typed a random zip code in a web page: When I clicked "Find the City!", a new web page popped up and this is what I saw: Of course, NetBeans didn't do this on its own -- it used this WSDL file: http://www.innergears.com/WebServices/CityStateByZip/CityStateByZip.asmx?...

One thing I've found useful about learning Wicket in NetBeans IDE is the IDE's code completion functionality. For example, here I'm creating a new Wicket component in the Source Editor, but I'm too lazy (or ignorant) to type the whole component type -- so, all I do is click Ctrl-Space and the code completion popup appears, displaying all the possible ways to complete the already-typed code, together with the related Javadoc: To set Wicket's Javadoc up in the IDE, go to the...

I found out yesterday how easy it is to create a plug-in that adds a new project-level menu item. It means making a very simple addition to the layer.xml file. I imagine that the new Delete Project menu item (available now from the Update Center) was probably added in this way. Here's what you do: <folder name="Projects"> <folder name="Actions"> <file name="org-myorg-genericprojectaction-GenericProjectAction.instance" /> </folder></folder> And then you can invoke the...

There's one difference between these two screenshots... what is it? Whoever gets the right answer first will get a postcard from Prague, signed by me as well as anyone else walking round the office at the time of my sending it! If you know the answer, or think you know, just leave your answer as a comment at the end of this blog entry. (People who are in Prague, who know the answer, are not allowed to enter -- especially you, Roumen!) Good luck to all the others...