Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Today NetBeans Day was held in Twente, which is an area in the east of the Netherlands, with a high population of grass and farm animals. The turnout was great, exactly as expected, though the narrow focus on MooTools, while relevant for the audience, limited active participation to cows only: The photo above was taken during the workshop "JavaScript Developers Are Basically Sheep", which had as a subtitle "Weakly Typed Languages Are For The Birds". Did you miss NetBeans Day...

Continuing the theme from the previous blog entry, here's the current state of my 'menubar' component, i.e., this is all I need to put into an HTML file... ...to get this: The above is a Bootstrap.css menubar, created from the Knockout component shown above. The HTML below is the template that styles the menubar, notice that there's JavaScript logic, thanks to Knockout, within the template: Finally, here's the business logic that connects the template to the component, which...

Imagine you need to create a menubar for your website: If you had a choice, which of the two below would you choose as the way to express your menubar? In both cases, you start by declaring Bootstrap.css: <link href="css/bootstrap.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/> However, which of the two would you prefer to use, after you have added the stylesheet reference above? Option 1: Option 2: Of course, it's up to you and I won't judge you either way. However, to me, option 2 is...

With Knockout, you can extend the DOM by means of widgets, also known as 'components', such as the "user" component that you see below, which has the parameters "firstName" and "lastName": As discussed yesterday and the day before in this blog, a component is created in JavaScript, like this: ko.components.register('user', { viewModel: function (params) { this.firstName = ko.observable(params.firstName); this.lastName = ko.observable(params.lastName); ...

The application structure discussed yesterday is as follows: Thanks to require.config, here's a significantly cleaned up version of the code discussed yesterday in 'init.js': require.config({ baseUrl: './', paths: { knockout: './bower_components/knockout/dist/knockout', text: './bower_components/requirejs-text/text', appViewModel : './scripts/appViewModel' }, waitSeconds: 2});require(['knockout', 'appViewModel', 'text'], function (ko,...

A problem with the solution discussed in the recent YouTube clip about component-based Knockout.js development is that you end up with your HTML template embedded in your JavaScript file, as shown below: From a tooling perspective, the above is suboptimal because you're not able to benefit from code completion and syntax coloring that an HTML editor provides. One approach would be to create an extension to NetBeans that would somehow recognize the above construct as being...

Knockout.js has some extremely handy facilities for doing component based development, as shown in this brand new YouTube screencast:

Following on from part 1 of this series, here's two interesting screenshots to look at: Above you see Eclipse code recommenders for NetBeans APIs, which is something Andreas Sewe and Marcel Bruch, from the Eclipse code recommenders project, have been working on, together with some NetBeans guys. Also read Marcel Bruch's tweet on this topic: https://twitter.com/MarcelBruch/status/598187743634706432 Imagine how much easier it will make learning the NetBeans APIs if the code...

The question of the day comes from my colleague JB Brock who asks: "Is there some key combination (shortcut) in NetBeans that allows me to jump between an opening brace and closing brace, or even better, the ability to select everything between braces? I'm working in a JSON file and want to select a full object between { } braces.  Just looking to see if there is something that could make my life a little easier as I have 105 of these little sections that I need to strip...