Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

During JavaOne 2014, I suddenly realized I was talking with Collin Fagan, who has been of great help to me over the years via his blogs and articles relating to Java Swing development, such as this one. We were chatting at the end of Werner Dietl's BOF on type annotations, where I had presented some experimental work done in this area by Jan Lahoda for NetBeans IDE. More on that another time. However, Collin mentioned his idea of a @Hack annotation. Often, when you're...

Back home in Amsterdam again after a wild and crazy week at JavaOne 2014 in San Francisco. Off the top of my head, without too much thinking, here's what I consider to be, in no particular order, the top 10 of the cool things happening over the past week in the context of NetBeans IDE. EPIK (Encouraging Programming in Kids). I'd never heard of EPIK, a UK-based community-driven programming group, until a few weeks ago and now they're an indelible part of the NetBeans community....

Busy, as always. The ones in bold are sessions where I'm speaking, the others are where I'm attending or booth duty. Sunday: NetBeans Day Monday: 08:30 - 10:30: TUT2372: Swing Away! Move to JavaFX 8 and the NetBeans Platform (Hilton - Imperial Ballroom A) 11:30 - 13:30: NetBeans Booth 14:30 - 15:30: CON3143: Coding for Desktop and Mobile with HTML5 and Java EE 7 (Hilton - Continental Ballroom 6) 16:00 - 17:00: CON6423: Scalable JavaScript Applications with Project Nashorn (Parc 55...

It's really pretty cool how you're able to configure fonts and colors for NetBeans IDE, export them to a ZIP file, and share them with others. That's how brilliant sites likes netbeansthemes.com have popped up in various places. Wouldn't it be cool if the same thing could be done with the icons in NetBeans? You'd go to the Options window and be presented with all the icons and then you'd be able to replace each of them with your own. Or, better still, you'd be able to...

And... here's the same application as yesterday, now deployed as an Android APK via Cordova to my Android device, which you can see in this screenshot because I have the NetBeans Droid@Screen plugin installed. It took me quite a while to get this working because I didn't know what was going wrong with the connection to the device. Turned out I hadn't installed the Samsung USB Driver: http://androidxda.com/download-samsung-usb-drivers 

I've blogged about Genymotion before, to me it's simply a fantastic Android emulator. Now I'm able to deploy a Knockout front-end via ADB to Genymotion, while the Knockout front-end is able to make a connection to a REST back-end: What you see above is Genymotion, displaying a Knockout front-end, that connects to a REST back-end running on localhost, while exposing the Manufacturer table from the Derby 'Sample' database that is part of NetBeans IDE and GlassFish. I used...

I learned a lot from a new YouTube clip by Thomas Stütz, a teacher who uses NetBeans to teach Java at a secondary school in Austria. (A lot more about him here.) It turns out that NetBeans is even better integrated with GlassFish than I thought it was. The @Entity annotation, shown in the YouTube clip by Thomas, gives you access to a series of dialogs for defining the persistence.xml, which also let you define the database itself. Pretty cool. This is a movie well worth...

Probably like most software-oriented people of my generation, I started out with a ZX Spectrum, purely as a game computer. One memory I have is of the "z" and the "x" keys on the keyboard being worn down to invisibility because we (my brothers, sister, and I) would use them excessively to move forward the little running guys in 'Daley Thomson's Decathlon'.  And possibly unlike most of that generation I have an actual photo of those early days. It must have been around 1989 and...

Gail and Paul Anderson (interviewed a few days ago here) passed on the happy news to me today. The eBook of JavaFX Rich Client Programming on the NetBeans Platform is available now. The physical tree based book (i.e., in addition to the eBook, there will be a treeBook!) will be available from the end of the month, when it will be released during JavaOne 2014. If you'll be at JavaOne 2014, please come to the book signing at the JavaOne bookstore, Tuesday, September 30, 15:30...