Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

"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...

Create the application described in the "Use a Java Class to Access the Data Source" section in the Connecting to Databases chapter of "Using NetBeans IDE 4.1", which is currently a work in progress. It consists of a Java class that accesses one of the default PointBase databases and displays two fields ("name" and "city") on a JSP page. Fast Track: Too lazy to create the application yourself? Or maybe you just want to see how JBoss connection pooling works with NetBeans IDE...

One cool thing about blogs.sun.com is that I can see exactly what someone typed in a search engine to get to my blog. So, what happens is, someone types in a query in a search engine (mostly Google, but many others too), a long list of links is returned, one of which is the one to my blog. When someone then clicks on the link to my blog, the query that they typed in is recorded somewhere in the settings pages of my blog. Cool, huh? (Check out Roumen's blog entry today, about J...

In one of my first blog entries (Servlet Connection Pooling for Dummies), I explained the cool NetBeans IDE feature that allows you to see a JSP's translated servlet after it has been deployed. It has to be deployed first before you can see it, because the servlet that you see is translated by the server, hence it needs to be there before it can be translated. In that blog entry I mentioned that one way to connect to a database from a servlet is to simply copy the translated...

Until now, I've been creating unnecessarily complex Ant scripts for deployment of applications to the server. What I've been doing is writing scripts that compile the classes and then move the whole application, piece by piece, to the server. (I don't compile the JSP pages, because the server does that automatically. In the case of Tomcat, JSP compilation happens the first time a JSP page is accessed. Click here for an earlier blog entry on this.) Then the server deploys it...

I've learnt quite a lot from Brian Leonard's article Integrating NetBeans with other J2EE Server Vendors. One relatively minor, but nonetheless useful, thing I've picked up from some of the Ant scripts attached to his article is the fact that they have big <echo> blocks. Take, for example, this target, which I referred to in a previous blog entry: <target name="webdoclet" depends="init, init-xdoclet" description="Generate deployment descriptors (run actionform to...

So now that I can start JBoss and stop JBoss from the IDE, generate JBoss deployment descriptors from the IDE, deploy an application from the IDE to JBoss, and use the NetBeans IDE debugger to connect to JBoss and debug my application (as explained in previous blog entries), there's nothing more I can do to integrate JBoss with NetBeans IDE 4.1. Right? Wrong. There's also the cool HTTP Monitor which, according to the final section of "Chapter 6: Web Applications" in the NetBea...

An unnamed developer, in an as-yet unpublished article, which I was lucky enough to read, really clarified a couple of things for me today. In a recent blog entry, it suddenly dawned on me that even though I had some cool little Ant scripts (hooked up to cool little NetBeans IDE menu items) for starting, debugging, stopping, testing, and deploying to a variety of servers (JBoss 4, Tomcat 4, and JRun 4), I couldn't really develop much in the IDE for these servers, because each...

Yes, NetBeans IDE can follow you everywhere. The only thing it can't do is your laundry (believe me, I've tried). So even though you've deployed to servers that the IDE doesn't "officially" support (such as JBoss4, Tomcat 4 and JRun4), not only can you deploy to them from within the IDE (as explained in previous blog entries), but you can also use the NetBeans IDE debugger to step through the source code on the server. Here's what I did to get it all working: Build the...