Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Very interesting. The team behind Ancestris, the genealogy app I highlighted yesterday, have developed a tool named Trancestris to help translate the resource files used by Ancestris. Trancestris is, itself, a NetBeans Platform application too. Apparently, it is very easy to use it, and it is available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux users.  Read all about it here. Would be extremely interesting to find out whether this tool could be used generically, e.g., to translate...

What I find really cool about NetBeans Platform applications is that, when I first discover them–with their familiar-ish looking application, community, and plugin ecosystem–it feels like stepping into a parallel universe. All along, there's been a constellation of stars that have been blinking quietly in very similar fashion to my own, in a different galaxy, with a set of aliens that look very similar to me. That's especially the case when it hasn't happened in a while and...

I met Marc Hoffmann, the author of the JaCoCo project, at JCrete. I probably asked him the dumbest question ever, so embarrassing that I can only document it here within braces. ("What does 'JaCoCo' actually stand for?"). Putting that awkward moment aside can best be done by showing how awesome JaCoCo support is in NetBeans IDE. Simply open your POM and stick the below into it: <build> <plugins> <plugin> <groupId>org.jacoco</groupId> ...

I'd always vaguely heard about Mirah, formerly known as Duby. But nothing like a quick movie to make a new technology crystal clear. As technology movies go, this one is pretty awesome in its clarity and relevance. It was uploaded during the last 24 hours and is really well done. All the key features explained and you also see how and why to mix/match Mirah with Java. &amp;amp;amp;lt;span id=&amp;amp;amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;...

Here's a POM that incorporates Lombok: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd"> <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion> <groupId>com.mycompany</groupId> <artifactId>BookManager</artifactId> <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version> <packaging>jar</packaging> ...

Weird how as soon as you have a new laptop, the old faithful one that stood by you throughout the past 5 years looks and feels like a brick that could only ever have been useful as a doorstop. (Then again, how faithful was it, breaking down in the middle of important presentations and constantly making its presence felt with loud whining chunky noises not unlike your broken washing machine.) But here it is, my new laptop, a Toshiba Tecra. Ultra light, definitely smaller than...

One of the things I learned about at JCrete is Lazybones, which is a command-line tool, similar to what Grails, Gradle, and Play provide, for bootstrapping new projects. In particular, Andres Almiray (@aalmiray) is interested in seeing a NetBeans plugin for Lazybones. The starting point for creating such a plugin is to install Lazybones and run it from the command-line, to make sure everything is set up correctly. Once you've done that, the next step is to call the Lazybones...

When you go to any kind of conference, specifically a software programming conference, even more specifically a Java conference, you hold certain truths to be self-evident. For example, there'll be a program, there'll be organizers, there'll be rooms, there'll be chairs. There'll be a ceiling. Well, no such thing, necessarily, at JCrete, an invitation-only annual conference, held for the 4th time, during this week, that strives to invite around 70 people in total. (Nice and...

I've noticed that the authors of "NetBeans Platform for Beginners" have started exposing the number of sales they have achieved. Below, notice the '304' (which will probably change quite quickly) at the lower left end of this screenshot: That's pretty good since the book has only existed for a few months and developers tend to share books they buy in PDF format. That probably means there are 300 teams of software developers around the world who are using the book, which is...