Allan Lykke Christensen » NetBeans

Review: NetBeans IDE 7 Cookbook

Allan Lykke Christensen — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 10:31:02 +0000

I recently got a copy of the newly release NetBeans cookbook from Packt Publishing. Being a huge fan of NetBeans I was excited to see a cookbook on the subject. The book is split into 12 chapters focusing on the main types of applications you can develop in NetBeans. Being a cookbook you can easily jump between the recipes based on what you you’re cooking. This is a great advantage if you want to learn something new in NetBeans without having to trawl through a lot of basic information. There are more than 70 recipes ranging for basic tasks such as debugging classes to more advanced tasks such as profiling your applications. My favourite recipes fall into the category of refactoring. The refactoring recipes saves developers an enormous amount of time. There is something for developers at all levels. Even if you are a seasoned NetBeans developer you’ll find some recipes that you’ve never heard of. For NetBeans newcomers there are many gems that will make your life easier. If you are studying or considering to study for the NetBeans Certification, this book is a great companion. My only critic of the book is that it could contain a few more advanced recipes for the routined NetBeans developers,

You can check out a sample of the book on the Packt Publishing website.

The book is excellent for beginners and because of that I give it 3.5 stars of 5.

LDAP Explorer 0.4 released

Allan Lykke Christensen — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 02:20:03 +0000

I managed to put the 0.4 release together before the original deadline of 13. March. In version 0.4 you’ll find:

Attributes are now sortable by clicking the column headings
Possible to give each LDAP server connection a label
Fixed NamingException when having more than one server connection / window open
Added connection timeout setting to LDAP server connection
More friendly attribute names
Support for Lotus Notes object classes
Silently accepts self-signed SSL certificates
Basic filtering

For the next release the UI will be changed slightly to accommodate query building and displaying of search results.

Note: From version 0.3 an update center was automatically created upon installation. To upgrade simply go to Tools – Plugins – Updates and click “Reload Catalog” followed by selecting the new version and clicking “Upgrade”

You can find the project site on Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/nb-ldap-explorer/

LDAP Explorer 0.3 and NetBeans Doxia Support

Allan Lykke Christensen — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:17:39 +0000

LDAP Explorer

This evening I released the third version of LDAP Explorer. The changes include:

Scrolling in the LDAP tree (could only view very small trees in 0.2 due to missing scrollers)
Replaced Swing-code with NetBeans classes (mainly replacing JTree with NetBeans nodes)
Nicer-looking icons + different icons depending on the type of LDAP entry
Includes an update center for ease of upgrading to future versions

You can grab a copy of the new version from the Google Code project page or the NetBeans Plugin Portal

NetBeans Doxia Support

In August 2009 I started a “NetBeans Goodies” project at Kenai.com where I intended to collect a bunch of NetBeans modules. The first Goodie would be support for APT files (Maven Doxia). If you’ve been reading my blog you’ll know that I got the basic code hacked together but then ran into some problems with defining the APT language in JavaCC. Anyway, This week I got prompted to continue the development of Doxia support by a keen user. I’ve therefore transfer the code from Kenai to Google Code and intent to pick up the coding in the upcoming weeks. You can find the project at Google Code. I haven’t released any versions of Doxia support yet, so if you want to give it a go you’ll have to check out the code from the Mercurial repository.

Previous blog entries about Doxia support:

LDAP Explorer 0.2 released

Allan Lykke Christensen — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:22:08 +0000

Over a nice glass of red wine I finished the second release of LDAP Explorer for NetBeans. New in this version:

Support for NetBeans 6.7
Possible to create LDAP connection profiles in the Services window
Cleaner browser window with the option to see attributes in table- or LDIF view.

You can download the new release from the Google Code Project Page or on the NetBeans Plugin Portal.

If you find any bugs or would like to see your favourite features in the module, please go ahead add it to the project page or as comments to this post.

Enjoy!

NetBeans LDAP Explorer update

Allan Lykke Christensen — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:29:10 +0000

Isn’t it just typical. You want to spend a few hours implementing a few features in your application and before you know it its 1 in the morning. Following my basic implementation of an LDAP Explorer in NetBeans, I wrote down a list of features I want to implement. Among the features were a registry of LDAP servers (so one doesn’t have to keep entering the connection details). So, if you look in the source repository you’ll find that I’ve implemented a registry of LDAP servers (accessible through the Services window). Activating the nodes will create a new window and connection to the directory service. With that in place, I’ve also removed the “LDAP Explorer” from the Window menu. Lastly I’ve also changed the NetBeans API dependency so that it is now compatible with NetBeans 6.7.

Next, I want to clean up the Explorer window (no need to display the connection details there anymore), followed by implementing an interface for conducting custom queries and executing LDIF commands.

If you got some feature requests or comments you are welcome to submit them at the Google Code project site or on the NetBeans Plugin Portal. Thanks.

LDAP Explorer Module for NetBeans

Allan Lykke Christensen — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 01:47:04 +0000

This is a short post (as I’m wasted and want to get some sleep). Recently I’ve been working with a lot of LDAP service and though it would be a nice addition to NetBeans if I could make simple lookups and browse LDAP directory services directly from NetBeans. Therefore I created a small module today (LDAP Explorer) which I’ll hopefully be able to maintain. The project is hosted at Google Code (Sun/Oracle is so confused about the future of Kenai.com and Java.net that I decided to scrap it for now – also, Kenai with Jira is just bloody slow). The project can be found at http://code.google.com/p/nb-ldap-explorer/. With the code currently in the repository you can make anonymous connections to an LDAP service and browse the nodes available under the Base DN. If you are interested in co-maintaining this module, please let me know. That is all for now.

Doxia APT rendered view now working

Allan Lykke Christensen — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:29:04 +0000

Thanks to Milos Kleint, I’ve got the APT rendered view working for the APT Editor. Hopefully this mean that I’ll be able to release version 1 of the module in the very near future. Still need to improve a bit on the JavaCC grammar, provide an APT code palette, and clean up the code. Anyway, here is a small video demonstrating the rendered view:

Doxia APT support coming closer

Allan Lykke Christensen — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:23:36 +0000

This and last weekend I’ve been working on improving the Doxia APT support in NetBeans. Namely I’ve been trying to integrate the Doxia APT parser with the NetBeans Lexer classes and secondly I’ve been implementing multi view support in the editor.

Doxia APT Parser integration

Last weekend a spend several hours trying to get my head around the Doxia Apt Parser and how it could be integrated with the NetBeans Lexer classes. Unfortunately I never found a way to do the integration. The NetBeans Lexer require that you implement the org.netbeans.spi.lexer.Lexer interface including a method, nextToken(), where each token is extracted as the file is being read. The Doxia AptParser on the other hand provide a simple parse method completing the parsing in one step. The two paradigms of parsing doesn’t seem to be compatible. If anyone got an idea on how to integrate the two I’d love to hear from you.

Multi View

The purpose of the multi view is to let Apt writers switch between the source code of an APT file and its rendered representation. So far I’ve managed to set up the NetBeans plumbing for displaying the two views and their components.

APT Multi View

Unfortunately I’ve run into a Classloader problem when using the Doxia Converter classes for turning APT files into XHTML files. Outside NetBeans the converter is working perfectly, but when I use it with the multi view inside NetBeans I get the following exception:

WARNING [org.netbeans.ProxyClassLoader]: Will not load class org.codehaus.plexus.container.initialization.InitializeResourcesPhase arbitrarily from one of ModuleCL@57a41eae[dk.i2m.netbeans.langsupport.apt] and ModuleCL@4ba805a3[org.netbeans.modules.maven.embedder] starting from SystemClassLoader[511 modules]; see http://wiki.netbeans.org/DevFaqModuleCCE

SEVERE [org.openide.util.Exceptions]

java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.codehaus.plexus.container.initialization.InitializeResourcesPhase

SEVERE [org.openide.util.Exceptions] java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.codehaus.plexus.container.initialization.InitializeResourcesPhase ...

I am still to look into what can be done about the classloader problem. I’ve checked the suggested link (http://wiki.netbeans.org/DevFaqModuleCCE), but it seems to only explain the problem, without providing a solution or workaround.

That’s all for now!

Doxia APT language support

Allan Lykke Christensen — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 08:42:15 +0000

As I use Maven for most of my projects I end up writing a fair amount of documentation using the APT format [1]. Unfortunately NetBeans doesn’t have any built-in support (syntax highlighting, parsing) for the language yet. So yesterday I decided to looking into providing file type and language support for NetBeans. I first stumbled across a lot of tutorials regarding the Generic Language Support. However, after some researched I found that it is no longer supported. Instead I found another more recent article on the NetBeans wiki about providing language support [2]. The article was quite sketchy and confused me a lot. The confusion was mainly because of too much focus on adapting a JavaCC grammar file for Java syntax highlighting. I hope for the final version of the article will have a simpler example. Nevertheless, the article got me on my way and I’ve now managed to create very basic syntax highlighting for the APT language.

APT Language Support in NetBeans

There is still a long way to go. I need to implement the parser and improve on the JavaCC grammar. Also, I’m planning to provide a “Preview” view in the editor so that the writer can get an idea of how the rendered document will look as he or she is writing.

If anyone knows of a good book or website about JavaCC, I’d very much like to hear from you.

That’s all for now!

[1] http://maven.apache.org/doxia/format.html
[2] http://wiki.netbeans.org/How_to_create_support_for_a_new_language

Thanks Sun! NetCAT gear arrived!

Allan Lykke Christensen — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:30:03 +0000

From March till June this year I’ve been participating in the NetCAT programme. As usual it was it a great experience lead by Jiri Kovalsky of Sun Microsystems. Every year this experience keeps getting better. The community testers are actively and passionately involved in improving the quality of NetBeans. For me it has also been a pleasure to discuss NetBeans issues with the developers who created it. I don’t think many developers get the opportunity to get so close to the technologies that they use everyday.

If you’ve been reading my blog you’ll also know that I’ve begun developing modules for NetBeans. Without the NetCAT programme I don’t think I would ever have dared getting into it. Hopefully in the future I’ll be able to join the NetFix team so that I can assist with solving bugs.

Lastly, Sun sent the top 15 NetCATs (I was number 11) a small gift of appreciation. A really cool windbreaker with the NetCAT logo. I love it!

I welcome NetCATs to connect on LinkedIn