Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

One way to learn about writing NetBeans Modules (NBMs) is to look at how others do it. Take, for example, Sandip Chitale's Module Explorer. It shows you all the NBMs installed in the IDE, together with a dependency graph and details tab (click to enlarge): When you open this NBM's source in the IDE, the structure in the Files window is as follows: From yesterday's blog entry, we know that the file that hooks the Action (ShowModuleExplorerAction.java in the screenshot above) to...

Let's pretend we haven't heard of Maven. Let's not use yesterday's blog entry to install Mevenide. Let's leave all that for another day. We'll appreciate Maven and Mevenide much more once we see how much more work we need to do without them. For now, let's just use our faithful friend NetBeans IDE together with Ant to create a simple NetBeans Module (NBM). You'll see it's actually pretty easy. At the end of the story, we'll use the Update Center to install the NBM in the...

Download and install Maven. Download and extract Mevenide. Then replace grammar-0.6.nbm with grammar-0.6.1.nbm which you can get here. Some fiddly bits: If you're behind a proxy, put its port and host in a build.properties file in your user home directory (the directory in which the .maven user directory is found). maven.proxy.host = maven.proxy.port = If you want to use JDK 1.5, set JAVA_HOME to JDK 1.4 but start the IDE with JDK 1.5 in etc/netbeans.conf: netbeans_jdkhome="c:...

Until yesterday, I'd never been aware of the fact that the Tomcat Manager has a web page from which applications can be started, stopped, reloaded, and undeployed. In the Runtime window, when you start the Tomcat Web Server and then expand the Web Applications node, one of the subnodes is called /manager. However, when you right-click this node and choose Open in Browser, you go to this URL: http://localhost:8084/manager/ This brings up an odd little page containing a few...

Follow the Java trail in the NetBeans IDE 4.1 Tag Library Tutorial. At the end of the Java trail, you should have two taghandlers (i.e., written in Java, not in JSP syntax) called DisplayLogoTag.java and FormatTextTag.java, together with a tag library descriptor (TLD) file called SimpleTagLib.tld. That's how the tutorial ends, more or less, but in real life your tag handlers often change and evolve so that it can be time-consuming and boring to manually re-synchronize them...

Sometimes the Source Editor gets really cluttered with open files. Instead of individually closing the files you don't want, by clicking the little cross on the right side of each file's tab at the top of the Source Editor, you can just right-click the tab for the file that you do want to keep... and then choose Close Other Documents: When you do this, all other files are closed and only the one that is currently selected remains open. That saves you a lot of clicking.

In a previous blog entry (Efficient Deployment via Ant Scripts from NetBeans IDE 4.1), I suddenly understood what deployment really means, thanks to my having to write an Ant script for this purpose: <target name="jboss-deploy" description="Deploy to JBoss"> <copy file="${dist.dir}/${jar.name}" todir="${jboss.deploy.dir}"/> </target> Since this target clearly does nothing more than copy an archive file (EAR, WAR, or EJB-JAR) to the server's deployment directory, it is...

Let's say you've extended the IDE by creating a new menu, toolbar, menu item, or toolbar button. For example, you've created menu items that are hooked up to Ant scripts that start and stop JBoss, Tomcat 4, WebSphere, and JRun from the IDE. Or you've customized your window layouts and editor settings. Or maybe you've added a module to the IDE. Or maybe you've added some other customization... such as the Demi Moore macro. What happens when you delete your user directory...

"Wicket is a new Java web application framework that takes simplicity, separation of concerns and ease of development to a whole new level. Wicket pages can be mocked up, previewed and later revised using standard WYSIWYG HTML design tools. Dynamic content processing and form handling is all handled in Java code using a first-class component model backed by POJO data beans that can easily be persisted using your favourite technology." (From What is Wicket?.) Download and...