Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

Here is a collection of screenshots from a proof of concept tool being developed by Nickolas Sabey and Sean Phillips from a.i. solutions. Before going further, read a great new article here written on java.net by Kevin Farnham, in light of the Duke's Choice Award (DCA) recently received at JavaOne 2013 by the a.i. solutions team. Here's Sean receiving the award on behalf of the a.i. solutions team, surrounded by the DCA selection committee and other officials: They won the...

Some mild consternation on the Twittersphere yesterday. Marcus Lagergren not being able to find the ASM classes in JDK 8 in NetBeans IDE: And there's no such problem in Eclipse (and apparently in IntelliJ IDEA). Help, does NetBeans (despite being incredibly awesome) suck, after all? The truth of the matter is that there's something called "ct.sym" in the JDK. When javac is compiling code, it doesn't link against rt.jar. Instead, it uses a special symbol file lib/ct.sym with...

The NetBeans HTML5 editor is pretty amazing, working on an extensive screencast on that right now, to be published soon. One thing missing is HTML Tidy integration, until now: As you can see, in this particular file, HTML Tidy finds 6 times more problems (OK, some of them maybe false negatives) than the standard NetBeans HTML hint infrastructure does. You can also run the scanner across the whole project or all projects. Only HTML files will be scanned by HTML Tidy (via JTidy) a...

Loads of new features have been added to NetBeans IDE during the NetBeans IDE 7.x release cycle, i.e., 7.0 together with all the minor releases that have come after that, up to 7.4, which was released during the last few days. Hard to keep track of everything added over all those releases, so instead of making a "What's New in NetBeans IDE 7.4" slide deck (which would only cover the highlights of the NetBeans IDE 7.4 Release Notes), as we would normally do, we've...

"Twitter Bootstrap is a free collection of tools for creating websites and web applications. It contains HTML and CSS-based design templates for typography, forms, buttons, navigation and other interface components, as well as optional JavaScript extensions. It is the most popular project on GitHub and has been used by NASA and MSNBC among others." (Wikipedia) Normally, when you read "getting started" instructions for Twitter Bootstrap, you're told to download various things...

My championing of TinkerForge, more than a year ago or so, has not been in vain. It introduced Neil Smith, developer of Praxis LIVE, to TinkerForge, who then subsequently turned his app into a visual development environment for working with TinkerForge: All the details of the above: http://praxisintermedia.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/visual-tinkerforge

A very interesting (silent) screencast shared in the comments to this blog yesterday by Paul Orlov from St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University, shows the visualization of data in a NetBeans Platform application for an eye-tracking study. Related to that, read this very interesting PDF document in the same domain, i.e., investigating the role of peripheral vision in visual attention in programming. Anyway, the screencast itself is too good not to share with the world: Of...

Constantin Drabo, who set up a JUG in Burkina Faso, sent me some cool screenshots (below) together with this text: "These are screenshots of my plugin for the the R Language for Statistical Computing for NetBeans IDE. It is not very mature right now, I'm working on a palette and code completion, hoping to finish in two weeks." A GitHub site is also being set up for this project. Anyone interested in joining in?

Let's imagine all you care about is development of applications using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. For example, you only want to create Knockout or Angular JS applications. How best to set up your IDE so that exactly those features, and no more, are included? You might want this very small minimalistic IDE if you're concerned about performance, startup time, and removing the clutter of all the buttons and menu items that don't relate to what you're doing. The simplest solution...