Planet NetBeans

Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...: TOTD #148: JPA2 Metamodel Classes in NetBeans 7.0 - Writing type-safe Criteria API

2010-10-29T12:33:00+00:00

NetBeans 7.0 M2 was released recently. There are several Java EE related improvements in this release:

Find usages of managed beans (JSF/CDI) and their properties
PrimeFaces is now available as an integrated JSF component library
Wizard for creating Bean Validation constraint
CDI Qualifier creation editor hint
Cleaned up Inspect Observer/Producer for CDI events
Generation of Bean Validation annotations for Entities

and some others. One of the features that is not much spoken about is the automatic generation of JPA 2 Metamodel classes from Entity classes. This Tip Of The Day (TOTD) will explain how to generate these classes and use them for writing type-safe JPA2 Criteria queries.

The JPA2 Metamodel classes capture the metamodel of the persistent state and relationships of the managed classes of a persistence unit. This abstract persistence schema is then used to author the type-safe queries using Critieria API. The canonical metamodel classes can be generated statically using an annotation processor following the rules defined by the specification. The good thing is that no extra configuration is required to generate these metamodel classes. NetBeans IDE automatically generates the canonical metamodel classes using the EclipseLink Canonical Model Generator. There are two ways these metamodel classes are generated in NetBeans:

Pre-configured when Entity Classes are generated from a Database using the wizards. TOTD #122 provide more details on that. The actual metamodel classes are generated when the project is build using "Clean and Build", "Deploy" or some other related target.
Explicitly configured by right-clicking on the project, "Properties", "Libraries", "Processor", "Add Library...", and select "EclipseLink(JPA 2.0)" and "EclipseLink-ModelGen(JPA 2.0)" libraries and click on "Add Library" as shown below.

This TOTD will use the "Manufacturer" table from the pre-configured "jdbc/sample" JDBC resource in NetBeans and GlassFish. It will create a simple 2-page application where the first page (index.xhtml) accepts a Manufacturer name and the second page (show.xhtml) displays some details about that manufacturer.

Create a NetBeans Web project with the title "CriteriaMetamodel", make sure to enable CDI and Java Server Faces during the creation.
Create "Manufacturer" JPA entity by using the pre-configured "jdbc:derby://localhost:1527/sample" database connection and using the MANUFACTURER table. Notice that the generated manufacturer entity contains the bean validation constraints derived from the database schema, yet another new feature in 7.0 M2. More on this topic in a later blog.

Generate the metamodel classes by right-clicking on the project and selecting "Clean and Build". The generated metamodel class looks like:

package org.glassfish.samples.entities; import javax.annotation.Generated; import
    javax.persistence.metamodel.SingularAttribute; import javax.persistence.metamodel.StaticMetamodel; @Generated("EclipseLink-2.1.0.v20100614-r7608 @ Mon Oct 25 16:35:03 PDT 2010") @StaticMetamodel(Manufacturer.class) public class Manufacturer_ { public static volatile SingularAttribute addressline2; public static volatile SingularAttribute zip; public static volatile SingularAttribute phone; public static volatile SingularAttribute addressline1; public static volatile SingularAttribute fax; public static
    volatile SingularAttribute manufacturerId; public static volatile SingularAttribute email; public static volatile SingularAttribute name; public static volatile SingularAttribute state; public static volatile SingularAttribute city; public static volatile SingularAttribute rep; }

This is shown as "Generated Sources" in NetBeans IDE as shown:

Generate a new Java class "DatabaseBean" and mark it with "@javax.enterprise.inject.Model" annotation. This class will be the "backing bean" for the JSF pages and will have
1. A field to accept the manufacturer's name from "index.xhtml"
2. A field to show information about the searched manufacturer in "show.xhtml"
3. A business method "searchManufacturer" that searches the database for the given manufacturer's name. This method will use the generated metamodel class and type-safe Criteria API to query the database.
The complete source code for the class looks like:
```
@PersistenceUnit EntityManagerFactory emf; String name; Manufacturer manufacturer; public String getName() { return name; } public void setName(String name) { this.name = name; } public Manufacturer getManufacturer() { return
    manufacturer; } public void searchManufacturer() { EntityManager em = emf.createEntityManager(); CriteriaBuilder builder = em.getCriteriaBuilder(); CriteriaQuery criteria = builder.createQuery(Manufacturer.class); // FROM clause Root root = criteria.from(Manufacturer.class); // SELECT clause criteria.select(root); // WHERE clause Predicate condition = builder.like(root.get(Manufacturer_.name), "%" + name + "%"); criteria.where(condition); // FIRE query TypedQuery query = em.createQuery(criteria); //
    PRINT result List manufacturers = query.getResultList(); if (manufacturers != null && manufacturers.size() > 0) { manufacturer = (Manufacturer)manufacturers.get(0); } } 
```
The business method returns the first manufacturer whose name contains the text entered in the textbox. No validation is performed in order to keep the business logic simple.

Notice how "searchManufacturer" method is not using any String-based identifiers for constructing the query graph. This gives the complete type-safety for query construction and allows the errors to be detected much earlier.
Edit the generated "index.xhtml" such that the content within <h:body> looks like:
```
<h:form> <h:panelGrid columns="3"> <h:outputText value="Name:" /> <h:inputText value="#{databaseBean.name}" id="name"/> </h:panelGrid> <h:commandButton
    actionListener="#{databaseBean.searchManufacturer}" action="show" value="submit"/> </h:form> 
```
This page shows a text box and a submit button. The "searchManufacturer" method of the DatabaseBean is invoked when the "submit" button is clicked and passes the entered text in the "name"property of the DatabaseBean.

Create a new XHTML page and name it "show.xhtml". Replace the generated boilerplate code with the code given below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/> <title>Show Manufacturer's Detail</title> </head> <body> Name: #{databaseBean.manufacturer.name}<br/> Phone:
    #{databaseBean.manufacturer.phone}<br/> Address Line1: #{databaseBean.manufacturer.addressline1}<br/> Address Line2: #{databaseBean.manufacturer.addressline2}<br/> </body> </html>

Now you can deploy the application to GlassFish by usual means and access "http://localhost:8080/CriteriaMetamodel/faces/index.xhtml" which gets displayed as:

Enter some value as "S" in the text box and click on "Submit" to display the result as:

The complete source code for this sample can be downloaded here.

Now Criteria query is little verbose but it does give you the type-safety and was explicitly asked within the JPA Expert Group. It allows you to manipulate different parts of a query such as SELECT, FROM, and WHERE clauses and that too using the Java type system. This reminds me of Mr Potato Head :-)

This behavior can be achieved in JPQL but is available exclusively using String manipulation and the errors are not detected until runtime.

How are you using Criteria API ?

What use cases would you like to see solved in JPA2.next ?

Technorati: totd jpa2 criteria metamodel netbeans javaee6 glassfish

Geertjan's Blog: Slacking Off On The NetBeans Platform

2010-10-29T07:41:57+00:00

When I titled the article around Allan Gregersen's Javeleon "Update Space Invaders Game While Playing It", I was being slightly frivolous. The point of Javeleon isn't to update a space invaders game while playing it, of course. Instead, the point is, more generically, to reload features while keeping their state.

But, in the comments to that article, Antonio Vieiro and Dominique De Vito pointed to their 'need' for such games being made available (Antonio because he'd like to play space invaders, Dominique because he envisions a game platform on the NetBeans Platform). Speaking of game platforms, take a look at JMonkeyEngine. But a more generic platform for games for the desktop would be very cool.

So Allan sent me the plugins for the games he's been working on. They're not finished nor polished, since he only made them to test and demonstrate Javeleon. None the less, they're nice:

Need to upload them to the NetBeans Plugin Portal soon! And we need lots of games such as this (tetris, chess, etc), which would then be distributed as a single application platform for other Java-based games to be be bundled together as a unit.

Update. Go here to download the Space Invaders game and go here to download the Break Out game!

Bistro!: GlassFish 3.1 Milestone 6 is out !

2010-10-28T20:24:20+00:00

As part of my various Java EE 6 and GlassFish presentations, I was in Luxemburg last week visiting the YaJUG. The other speaker having declined a few weeks before the event, I ended up doing a two part presentation, the second one focused on GlassFish (slides). I think both went well but I'll confess that I received the same feedback from three different attendees - GlassFish 3.x needs to have clustering before it is seriously considered as a strategic runtime for their company (lots of banks in Luxemburg).

I honestly didn't think that lacking clustering in 3.0.x was such a big issue for the following reasons:
• Java EE 6 and modularization (HK2/OSGi) were more important
• people are still building Java EE 6 applications
• GlassFish 2.1.1 provides state of the art clustering today for Java EE 5 applications
• GlassFish 3.1 (which has Clustering as its main theme) will follow the 3.0.1 release by less than a year to provide a second-generation Java EE 6 product with centralized admin, load-balancing, and HA.

Now, perception is more important than my personal take on this so, here's where GlassFish 3.1 stands :
• it is feature-complete and Milestone 6 was released just today, so try that build out : Full distro (79MB), Web Profile (51MB)
• Shreedhar discussed some of the HA improvements (see this post on TheAquarium)
• FishCAT is back!

Get the full schedule from the GlassFish Wiki.

Inspiration and Expression » Netbeans: Oracle Java Roadmap for Client Side

2010-10-28T06:43:39+00:00

Finally, Oracle speak about Java Roadmap especially for the client side at JavaOne 2010 JDK BOF session which you can see from Amy Fowler blog. From what I can understand, it boils down to several things:

Java Swing Future

It is still not very clear yet, how Java Swing will evolve in the future as said in the blog above

The crux of the problem is that Swing is rooted in the antiquated AWT, rather than being integrated into the 2D coordinate system. Fixing this would require some massively incompatible changes and once you march down that path, well, you start asking yourself what other incompatible improvements should be made ….pretty soon the remodel becomes reconstruction and you realize that a new foundation is really needed.

But don’t get me wrong, it is not whether Swing will vanish or not, of course everything will be evolved. But, the focus is on the evolution of Swing and it is still unclear how Swing will evolve in the future. As you can see from the things that I quote above, “Swing is rooted in the antiquated AWT… and fixing this would require some massively incompatible changes …remodel becomes reconstruction …”

However, the good news is that whatever decision Oracle made to Swing evolution, “it’s still there and it isn’t going anywhere” as Amy said.

Java FX Future

On the other hand, Java FX get the most focus and attention for Java client side and have much more clear roadmap. In contrast to Swing, Java FX has more modern underlying structure (Prism + scene-graph + UI controls) plus a hardware-accelerated graphics pipeline with a UI rooted in a 2D/3D scene-graph can do. Imagine what you can do as Java developer for either business application or RIA media frenzy application like you saw on iPhone, etc with hundreds of rotating media cubes or jumbling block. It will gonna be interesting.

And from what I can understand from Amy’s blog. Currently, Oracle is converting JavaFX to a proper Java library and killing JavaFX script. So Java developers don’t have to learn a new language to use it. And the good news is “… Much of the JavaFX stack has already been ported off of script, so this is all quite real and the team is ecstatic to be doing Java again..” said Amy

Development Environment/Tools (Netbeans)

“A sleeper detail from Thomas Kurian’s keynote is that NetBeans will be the Java development IDE of choice going forward. This is very good news for Swing, ensuring it’s support and upkeep for a long time to come.”

And on the JavaFX front “we are working closely with that team to ensure JavaFX2.0 is toolable from the start.”

Summary

So my summary are
- Swing evolution is uncertain yet, but Swing is here to stay.
- JavaFX script is dead, but soon there will be JavaFX as Java library.
- Netbeans will provide tooling support for JavaFX

Sources:

APIDesign - Blogs: Excel in Designing DSLs for Excel People

2010-10-27T21:53:00+00:00

Do you unit test your Excel formulas? Is that even possible? My new post is not going to teach excel users new tricks, but it may help you to excel in designing domain specific languages. Either external or embedded (into Java or Excel ;-).

--JaroslavTulach 21:53, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

NetBeans for PHP: NetBeans Git Support - Help

2010-10-27T13:12:34+00:00

Probably the next version of NetBeans will have Git support in the standard distribution. In the past I was advocating to have good Git support in NetBeans, because many PHP users ask for it. Few days ago Tomas, who works for the team that develop the Git support, asked to help him to review their documents. I would like to ask you, if you are interested in Git support, help us with it. I have to admit that you use Git more then me, so we would like to know your opinion, your cases etc.

The entry point for the documents is here. You can write comments, opinion and post them at git@versioncontrol.netbeans.org mailing list or write here under this post and I will post your note to the right team. Thank very much for your help.

Michel Graciano's Blog: Copy and Paste History module updated for NetBeans 7.0

2010-10-26T15:15:44+00:00

I have just updated my module to support the new NetBeans 7.0. Some libraries updates was necessary and minor fixes has been done too so, if you wish to keep using the plugin at next NetBeans release, just download it from the plugin page.
Of course, if you wish to contribute to the plugin, just visit the page for access the source code or even file any kind of issue in java.net website.

Geertjan's Blog: NetBeans Platform Screenshots from Institute of Marine Research, Bergen

2010-10-26T14:42:47+00:00

The team that did the training at the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen in April this year sent some screenshots today, to show part of the progress they've made with the NetBeans Platform.

In addition to the NetBeans Platform training, the team also followed a training from Geomatys in Geotoolkit and PuzzleGIS. Below, in the screenshots, you see the integration of maps with the other dialogs in the NetBeans Platform application. Several general Swing widgets have been used enabling the integration of advanced GIS functionality into Java desktop applications. The screenshots also show that the team has worked more with their general gridcontrol and database service provider.

A lot of work still needs to be done and, though it is still all a work in progress, the screenshots are already very cool:

Looks great, doesn't it? The team is hoping to come up with a version that their end users will test onboard their research vessels early next year.

Michel Graciano's Blog: NetBeans Platform 6.9 Developer's Guide review

2010-10-25T22:09:24+00:00

The first thing I would like to highlight is the foreword from Geertjan Wielenga, which makes clear this book has a target: introduce NetBeans Platform building a sample application from scratch and that "zero knowledge of the NetBeans Platform is assumed", but you should keep in mind that Java and Swing knowledge are required. If it is not what you are looking for, as suggested by Geertjan you could look for "The Definitive Guide to the NetBeans Platform" and "Rich Client Programming: Plugging into the NetBeans Platform" which continue to be the best detailed sources about NetBeans Platform APIs, together with the several NetBeans Platform tutorials, of course.

The 1st chapter introduces the reader to the modularization world, why it is necessary with simple explanation and of course many aspects of how NetBeans Platform try to solve this issues are explained with good theory and samples. The most interesting point in this chapter is not just the NetBeans module system but the OSGi support, the de facto module system.

The 2nd chapter summarize how to create and customize UIs using Matisse and chapter 3th how to use and organize your UI in a NetBeans Platform using the Window System. These chapter was well write with good examples to how create and organize the views for your application.

The 4th chapter probably is one of the most important chapter in this book which describes one of the most important NetBeans APIs: Lookup. In this chapter, you will learn how to communicate between modules in a loosely-coupled way.

The 5th chapter the author presents to us how to write global Actions and the 6th chapter, together with chapter 4th, we have the most important chapter in my opinion, presenting the Nodes API and the Explorer and Property Sheet API. Here you will learn how and when use nodes as well how to shows it in your application.

The next two chapters covers the FileSystem API and Datasystems API respectively. These APIs help you to work with the local file system, the NetBeans central registry and how to registry and work with your own file types.

The 9th chapter covers how to write dialogs and wizards and chapter 10th how to store settings and integrate your application with NetBeans Options dialog. The next chapter 11th we learn how to create help sets and integrate it to Help menu as well how to support context-sensitive help sets for each of our UIs.

For next you will learn how to set the branding of the application, defining a new name and title for the application as well how to change the splash screen and icons in the chapter 12th. The chapter 13th shows you how to distribute the application creating installers for several operating systems as well how to distribute it in a ZIP file and the last but not least how to write and support live updates for your application or modules.

The book was really well write, the language is really accessible and easy to understand, and the examples cover satisfactory the book target.
There are minor issues as every book but I recommend it mainly if you don't know the NetBeans Platform or just know it superficially. In my opinion the only complain about the digital version of the book is the images quality, most of them are hard to read and understand since it look distorted.

cld: If you care about Java on MacOS X - Consider this Petition

2010-10-25T01:24:00+00:00

If you care about Java on MacOS X think immediately about signing the petition and altering your buying behavior.

APIDesign - Blogs: Giving Up on Linux Packaging

2010-10-22T13:45:00+00:00

This post is for Linux and NetBeans users. Do you use NetBeans package on your Linux? Do you want to continue doing so? In such case we need your help!

--JaroslavTulach 13:45, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...: Screencast #33: NetBeans 7.0 M2 and GlassFish 3.1 Features

2010-10-20T21:04:12+00:00

NetBeans 7.0 M2 was released recently and comes pre-bundled with GlassFish 3.1. Vince Kraemer has been blogging about several features that have been introduced in the builds recently:

Now, you can see all these features live in action in this screencast:

Enjoy!

Thanks Vince!

Technorati: screencast netbeans glassfish

Geertjan's Blog: UNESCO, DJ Native Swing, and NetBeans RCP

2010-10-20T13:49:26+00:00

UNESCO's work with the NetBeans RCP is well documented. I've been in touch with that project's manager, Jean-Claude Dauphin, for some time. He's been eagerly waiting for JWebPane (also because JDIC failed to work solidly for him, not at all for some operating systems).

So he was very happy with Josch's NetBeans RCP/DJ Native Swing Integration. He followed the instructions, extending the sample to cater for Windows 32-bit and sent me the screenshot below to prove his success:

I'm looking forward to hear from him whether this (definitely cumbersome, thanks SWT) approach will prove to be more complete than JDIC.

Geertjan's Blog: Commercial NetBeans RCP Applications from Argentina

2010-10-19T21:36:21+00:00

Another bunch of YANPA's today, this time from Argentina, screenshots made available by Gustavo Santucho:

Description: Defect tracking application. Deployed on tablet-like devices, i.e., the team tried to build something that could be used with a "pen" in the field. Originally for a construction site defect-tracking and completion analysis company, but some effort has been put to make it more generic.

Description: Marketing research for lab applications. The application includes an interesting array of technologies, from Lucene to Web Services. Mainly targeted to marketing research departments running inside drug laboratories, but also used by other health care professionals and institutions. You could do this from different points of view, such as symptoms treated, scientific names, commercial names, and you have an on-line connection to current prices on the market.

Description: Shipment application. This is the user interface for a bigger Java EE application managing orders, inventory and shipment tracking both between branches and to customers. Built for a publisher distributing books around the country.

NetBeans for PHP: Consolidated Article on Code Templates

2010-10-19T13:09:44+00:00

I've just published a tutorial on <a href="http://netbeans.org/kb/docs/php/code-templates.html">Code Templates in NetBeans IDE for PHP</a>. This tutorial consolidates Petr Pisl's <a href="/netbeansphp/entry/code_templates_in_netbeans_php">original blog post</a> and Tomas' post on <a href="/netbeansphp/entry/php_templates_improved">improvements to Code Template support</a>. It also has a section on code template syntax, including a table of PHP-specific hints. Lastly, there's a section with some use cases for creating your own code templates, suggested by Filip. Please let me know here or in a Feedback email if there is anything more you'd like covered, or if you have some more common use-cases.<br /> <div id="_firebugConsole" style="display: none;" firebugversion="1.5.4"></div>

Geertjan's Blog: Hello DJ Native Swing on the NetBeans RCP

2010-10-18T17:29:46+00:00

Who knows the future of JWebPane. Time to look for alternatives, in my humble opinion. Aljoscha Rittner, who is giving a NetBeans Platform Certified Training together with me in Bielefeld, Germany, recently figured out how to integrate DJ Native Swing into the NetBeans Platform. (He's not the first, look at the screenshot here and then at the comments at the end of that article.) Now I know how to do it too, since he transferred all his knowledge to me:

The menubar within the browser above can be removed, as well as other customizations that can be done, etc. But this is a basic starting point.

The bad news is that we're now in the world of SWT:

Ah well. The code will be shown in an article on DZone soon.

By the way, this is the first step to integrating the Vaadin visual designer into NetBeans IDE:

Or, look at it now, without all the various bars (location bar, menu bar, tool bar), launched such that the Vaadin visual designer is displayed, without the user needing to go there manually:

Vaadin provides editor hooks from the above website so that drag/drop actions can be reflected in an editor underlying the above page. Hence, imagine the above as a new tab in a multiview window, with one of the tabs providing the Java source code editor in NetBeans IDE.

Geertjan's Blog: Decoupling NetBeans Vaadin Plugin from Vaadin JARs

2010-10-16T14:04:43+00:00

As requested by Joonas and others on the Vaadin team, it's now possible to access the list of Vaadin versions, and choose one, which will then be downloaded, when creating Vaadin-based web applications in the IDE:

When you click the "Download" button, you see info parsed from this handy file that the Vaadin team made available for these purposes, as shown below:

I checked in an initial version of the above functionality into the Vaadin repo on Kenai. Some fixing and testing needs still to be done. Then the binary will be made available.

Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...: Java EE 6 & GlassFish @ Silicon Valley Code Camp 2010 Trip Report - Slides Now Available

2010-10-16T00:36:09+00:00

What's common between 350 Mountain Mike's Pizza, 920 Erik's Deli Sandwiches, 29 huge jugs of Peet's Coffee, and 194 geek sessions ?

It takes 1876 developers, hackers, architects, technology honchos etc to consume all of them over a weekend :-)

Yes, we are talking about Silicon Valley Code Camp 5.0!

This is a for the developer community, by the developer community, and to the developer community event focused on Agile, Cloud, HTML5, Google Developer Tools & Platforms, Java, Web services, and many other topics. The code camp website shows attendance records from the previous years as:

A slightly updated view of this data is:

As you can see, there is steady year/year growth in the number of sessions, registration, and attendance. This year specifically has seen about 60% growth on registrations and 80% on the actual attendance. The ratio between registered/attended was also steady for the first few years and has also gone higher this year. This event has truly grown organically over the past years and is the second biggest conference, with Java focus, in the USA after JavaOne! Oracle certainly was a platinum sponsor of this conference. Are there any other bigger conferences that I don't know of ? ;-)

It would be interesting to revisit this pattern if the event starts charging a nominal (may be optional) fees from all the attendees. However the main website highlights three points:

by/for the developer community
always free
never occur during work hours

GlassFish team presented several sessions at the Code Camp:

Java EE 6: Doing More with Less
Java EE 6 Tooling
Introduction to JAX-RS
Servlets 3.0: Asynchronous, Extensible, Easy-to-use
OSGi and Java EE in GlassFish
Running your Java EE 6 applications in the Cloud

I could not deliver #5 due to a conflict but slides from all the sessions are now available:

Here are some key pointers for you:

Download/Participate in GlassFish community at glassfish.org
Download/Participate in NetBeans community at netbeans.org
GlassFish Videos: youtube.com/GlassFishVideos
NetBeans Videos

Check out the complete list of sessions by Oracle at the Code Camp. Please enter session evaluations at http://siliconvalley-codecamp.com/SessionsOverview.aspx (make sure you are logged in and then click the link at the end of the session you attended that says 'Evaluate').

The Android App was pretty useful, did not try the iPhone App. I wonder if there was a session on "How I created the Android/iPhone App" :-)

Personally, this was my fourth code camp (2009, 2008, 2007) and I enjoyed meeting the local geek community. I could barely spend Saturday morning at the code camp and delivered two of my sessions but its always fun to meet the usual suspects. Many thanks to Peter Kellner, Van Riper, Tammy Baker, Kevin Nilson, other organizers, and many other volunteers for running a great show!

Couple of suggestions for next year ...

Expose the RESTful API for the code camp registration/session/speaker/etc data and organize a competition on the best created app. May be a panel with different attendees who attempted to build this application ?
Make sure the speakers are not running across the campus between their back-to-back talks.

Check out some of the pictures:

And the complete photo album:

Looking forward to Silicon Valley Code Camp 6.0 next year!

Technorati: conf svcc javaee6 glassfish netbeans eclipse intellij cloud osgi servlets restful

APIDesign - Blogs: London: Smells Bad. Feels Good.

2010-10-15T20:28:00+00:00

I'm just finishing my visit to London to propagate the NetBeans Platform. Few open questions are left in my head and also I'd like to make one suggestion: By my next return, can someone improve the air?

--JaroslavTulach 20:28, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

Geertjan's Blog: NetBeans Platform at SkillsMatter, London

2010-10-15T07:30:58+00:00

A second session on the NetBeans Platform was held at SkillsMatter last night (here's a report on the first). Below you see Jaroslav Tulach and Toni Epple in action:

During the "No Slides, Just Code" demo, they created a small Twitter Client application on the NetBeans Platform, illustrating many of the main NetBeans Platform concepts along the way.

It was great to meet several developers from the NetBeans Platform community, such as Edvin Syse (read about why he moved from Eclipse RCP to the NetBeans Platform here), Mark Phipps (read about his financial management console on the NetBeans Platform here), Zane Cahill (one of the translators of Heiko and Jurgen's books), Tim Dudgeon (get his organization's free/commercial Instant JChem here), Peter Harman (working on an amazing modeling IDE on the NetBeans Platform, more info about that soon), and Dionisis (lecturer at London colleges where NetBeans Platform trainings will be held, read more about that soon).

Here's a pic of part of the group:

Also, discussions have been held with SkillsMatter about organizing a NetBeans Platform course via SkillsMatter together with Eppleton, probably to be held around March next year. Interested in joining in? Based on discussions in the pub after the session yesterday, there's at least about 8 people who have already indicated they will be there. We'll probably try to limit the training to around 12 to 15 people, so drop me a line (or leave a comment here or write to toni dot epple at eppleton dot de).

Michel Graciano's Blog: New GridBagLayout designer for NetBeans 7.0

2010-10-14T12:47:56+00:00

I have just noticed the new GridBagLayout designer for NetBeans 7.0. There is no much details yet but it is a really good addition for the new version, specially for people like me work with Swing day after day. To see the disclaimer about it, take a look at the NetBeans 7.0 news page. Hopefully I will have time to review this new feature here and post my personal fellings about it soon.

Happy coding!

Geertjan's Blog: Embedding JavaScript Editor in Java Editor

2010-10-14T11:31:33+00:00

Via Dmitry Safonov on the dev at platform dot netbeans dot org mailing list:

Code:

import org.netbeans.api.editor.mimelookup.MimeLookup; import org.netbeans.api.java.lexer.JavaTokenId; import org.netbeans.api.lexer.InputAttributes; import org.netbeans.api.lexer.Language; import org.netbeans.api.lexer.LanguagePath; import
    org.netbeans.api.lexer.Token; import org.netbeans.api.lexer.TokenUtilities; import org.netbeans.spi.lexer.LanguageEmbedding; import org.netbeans.spi.lexer.LanguageProvider; import org.openide.util.lookup.ServiceProvider; @ServiceProvider(service = LanguageProvider.class) public class EmbeddingLanguageProvider extends LanguageProvider { private Language embeddedLanguage; public static final String START_FRAGMENT = "/*-{"; public static final String END_FRAGMENT = "}-*/"; @Override public
    Language<?> findLanguage(String mimeType) { return null; } @Override public LanguageEmbedding<?> findLanguageEmbedding(Token<?> token, LanguagePath languagePath, InputAttributes inputAttributes) { initLanguage(); if (JavaTokenId.BLOCK_COMMENT == token.id()) { if (token.text() != null && TokenUtilities.startsWith(token.text(), START_FRAGMENT) && TokenUtilities.endsWith(token.text(), END_FRAGMENT)) { return
    LanguageEmbedding.create(embeddedLanguage, START_FRAGMENT.length(), END_FRAGMENT.length()); } } return null; } private void initLanguage() { embeddedLanguage = MimeLookup.getLookup("text/javascript").lookup(Language.class); if(embeddedLanguage == null) { throw new NullPointerException("Can't find language for embedding"); } } }

From e-mail from Dmitry: "Lexer-based coloring (keywords, string literals) works fine, as well as completion for abbreviations (start typing "switch" and press ctrl+space), but semantic highlighting and more advanced completion doesn't seem to work. One disadvantage of such language extension is that modules which provide original languages often are Non-API modules and if you want to use TokenId definitions from original language in your code you should specify Implementation dependency on them."

Thanks Dmitry.

Arun Gupta, Miles to go ...: Java2Days 2010 Trip Report

2010-10-12T21:03:04+00:00

Java2Days 2010 in Sofia, Bulgaria was my first trip to Eastern Europe. I spent more time flying than actually in the city because of personal reasons but enjoyed the conference. There were approx 500 attendees but this being the only major conference in this part of the world, its only bound to grow.

The Day 1 conference started late and some initial speakers took extra time and thus by lunch time there was an hour long gap. My talk on "Running your Java EE applications in the Cloud" was bumped to end of the day in order to get back in track. Yes, the conference did get back on track but I lost a significant chunk of audience because of further delays by other speakers after lunch. Anyway the slides are available:

Running your Java EE 6 applications in the clouds

The talk explained

Oracle's definition of Cloud and talked about Exalogic Elastic Compute Cloud, a.k.a "Cloud in a box"
Light-weight ness, extensibility, and simplicity/ease-of-use of Java EE 6
How to run Java EE 6 on Amazon, RightScale, Elastra, and Joyent
Comparison of multi-cloud vendors
What Java EE currently offers for the Cloud and what's coming in Java EE 7

The other talk demonstrated how NetBeans provide extensive tooling around Java EE 6 & GlassFish. The slides-free talk showed how NetBeans makes you a lazy, aka productive, programmer and showed the wizards, code completion, integrated javadocs etc for Java Server Faces 2 (JSF), Context & Dependency Injection (CDI), Java Persistence API 2 (JPA), Servlets 3.0, Enterprise Java Beans 3.1 (EJB), and Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS). The complete sample application build during the talk can be downloaded here. Here is a review from one of the attendees:

No ivory tower or Chinese slides. Just NetBeans, Glassfish and the developer! I hope that more and more people think now that Java and Java EE in particular is much better than the various strange combinations like RoR, PHP or some other awkward framework that promises developer heaven.

Check out screencast #30 to view the complete set of Java EE 6 Netbeans tooling. Java EE 6 tooling is also available in Eclipse and can be seen in the screencast #31.

The speakers' dinner to a local BBQ was one of the highlights. Enjoyed Rakia, local food, beautiful performances by local dancers, and then learning some basic steps with them. I wonder how many other conferences are going to provide a speakers's dinner event like that ;-)

Enjoyed meeting Andrew Lombardi, Reza Rehman, Vassil Popovski, Damon Edwards, Eugene Ciurana, Geroge Reese, James Ward, Werner Keil, other speakers, and of course Alexis!

Many thanks to Emo, Yoana, Iva, Evo, Bobby, and rest of the Java2Days team. Their warm "airport to airport" hospitality started at the Sofia airport where Emo came to receive some of us and went all the way back to the airport when Evo ensured that I'm checked in at the airport. Looking forward to participate again next year!

Some travel tips to Bulgaria ...

Bulgaria ~~is not part of EU yet and~~ does not accept Euros so make sure to withdraw some local currency from the ATM machines.
Any spirits/alcohol/wine from the duty free needs to be checked in if you are flying through EU.
Taxi drivers take local currency only, no credit cards.
1 Bulgarian Lev is apporx $0.75.
Language will likely be an issue but with a local team member this was well taken care for us.
Make sure to try out some Rakia, it's 40% alcohol made with either grape, apricot, and plums.
I was told to not run on the streets because there were drug addicts in at least the part of city where we were staying.
Sofia is not a small city and the traffic can be intense during peak hours so plan accordingly.

And finally some pictures ...

And the complete album:

Next stop is Silicon Valley Code Camp which starts in about 3 more hours. This is the 5th anniversary of the conference and 4th mine (2009, 2008, 2007). With about 3000 registered attendees, this is going to be quite a conference. If half of the registered attendees show up, then this is going to be the biggest US conference after JavaOne!

Technorati: conf java2days sofia bulgaria glassfish javaee6 cloud netbeans

Geertjan's Blog: Follow That NetBeans RCP Blog!

2010-10-12T19:17:42+00:00

Final days of my vacation (haven't left Crete yet) and I'm beginning to catch up on things. The best thing I've come across in the past weeks is this link:

http://layerxml.wordpress.com/

It is by a NetBeans Platform developer in Sweden, Nicklas Löf from Artificial Solutions, who have a few NetBeans Platform applications of their own (search for them here), such as this one, an inventory management system:

Nicklas' new blog currently includes entries on Lookup, Nodes, and TopComponents.

Follow that blog!

Bistro!: Java2Days 2010 : server-side heavy, with still all the fun

2010-10-11T09:50:33+00:00

I'm back from Sofia and another java2days conference. As it was the case last year, the agenda was pretty heavy on server-side content with Java EE, Spring, CDI, and cloud-related talks. This year the conference also had two additional tracks to cover mobile and cloud (not sure how those went, I was busy preparing slides and attending sessions in the bigger room). I was presenting on Java EE 6 adoption and OSGi for GlassFish and Java EE developers. Both sessions had great attendance and a good set of questions (after the talk since 45 minute-sessions made it really hard for me to leave time for Q&A). The SAP folks in particular (large team based on Sofia) had a number of questions around OBR, P2, Felix vs. Equinox, etc...

I enjoyed meeting Reza Rahman again who seems to be working hard on passing the Java EE 6 Web Profile TCK for Resin. Reza presented on CDI, testing Java EE (which I had very much enjoyed at JavaOne) and an informative talk on how the JCP works. Arun has more details on the speaker's diner which, as always, was one of the highlights of the conference.

While I didn't attend the other tracks, I had interesting discussions with James Ward (Adobe), Andreas Jakl (Nokia), George Reese, Josh Long (now at VMWare/SpringSource), Vladimir Pavlov (SAP), Katya Todorova (SAP), Werner Keil (JCP EC member) and was happy to meet again with Andrew Lombardi, Talip Ozturk, Vassil Popovski, ... I even did a podcast with Damon Edwards & John Willis some 24 hours after hearing the term "devops" for the first time (yes, I've been living in a cave).

With 500 attendees, I think this was yet another great conference. Let's have some more Java SE content next time (there will be plenty to talk about in 12 months)!

APIDesign - Blogs: Removing protected abstract Methods is no Longer Source Compatible

2010-10-08T07:44:00+00:00

Rijk van Haaften noticed today that removing protected abstract methods (which used to be source compatible) is no longer compatible at all. I am adding his comment to errata for chapter 6. Please find Rijk's observation there.

--JaroslavTulach 07:44, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

In perfect (spherical) shape: Improved JUnit support in NetBeans 7.0

2010-10-08T07:33:22+00:00

The 7.0 release of NetBeans will extend the support for the JUnit framework addind the following functionalities (I'm told some of them can already be found on Eclipse):

The 4.8.2 release of the JUnit library has been integrated.
You can now run or debug a single test case (method) in a suite (class) from the editor context menu.
It's now possible to rerun only failed tests.
The filtering of the test results view was improved. It' now allowed to select the result states (passed, failed, error) which will be hided in the result view.
The tabbed output was implemented for the test results view.

All the relevant informations can be found on the official NetBeans site.

In perfect (spherical) shape: Don't forget the content type

2010-10-07T10:39:29+00:00

In one of our legacy projects all web services were exposed through SAAJ servlets; having to expose a new one we opted for a newer JAX-WS style, also thanks to everything that NetBeans gives you right out of the box.

So we created a new Web Service (you can check this tutorial to see how it is done) and wrote all the tests and code we needed. Everything went fine, until we tried to test the whole project (which should be mandatory before you commit).

At this point some of our old tests failed, all reporting the same error:

SAAJ0532: Absent Content-Type

The offending code builds a message that we use to test the parser:

private SOAPMessage buildMessage(String filename) throws IOException, SOAPException {
 InputStream resourceAsStream =
    this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream(basepath + filename);
 MessageFactory messageFactory = MessageFactory.newInstance();
 SOAPMessage message = messageFactory.createMessage(new MimeHeaders(), resourceAsStream);
 return message;
}

At first it caught me off balance because our additions and changes went nowhere near the code related to the failure. Then it must be something related to the environment, which is the fact that NetBeans added a dependency on the JAX-WS 2.1 library that probably has some conflicts with the SOAP jars we use.

As some manual tests seemed to confirm that the application is working normally, we deferred the investigations (not for very much longer!) and simply fixed the test:

private SOAPMessage buildMessage(String filename) throws IOException, SOAPException {
 InputStream resourceAsStream =
    this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream(basepath + filename);
 MessageFactory messageFactory = MessageFactory.newInstance();
 MimeHeaders headers = new MimeHeaders();
 headers.addHeader("Content-Type", "text/xml");
 SOAPMessage message = messageFactory.createMessage(headers, resourceAsStream);
 return message;
}

And now an afterthought. The test failed, yet the application did not. Does this mean our test was wrong? Actually it only means that the previous library was more forgiving, because the test has proved useful for a long time (also spotting a regression). It is better to have a not-so-perfect test than none at all.

TechAshram » NetBeans: A GUI program using NetBeans

2010-10-06T12:42:52+00:00

Well this is a GUI program that I have created using Netbeans.

In this program the computer generates a Random Number after hitting the Generate button which the user has to guess.

The User enters his Number and hits the Check button to check if the number matches Computer’s number.

The user has a maximum of 5 chances to check the number and the computer gives hints on every wrong guess.

Snapshots-

NetBeans for PHP: Formatting PHP and HTML

2010-10-06T12:38:20+00:00

I have made a few enhancements and fixes in the formatting area, where PHP and HTML is used in one file together. It's not ideal and probably there are many cases, when it doesn't work as you want. So if you find a case, when the formatter doesn't work correctly, please file a new bug in our Bugzilla.

Probably the most visible change is that the formatter in NetBeans 6.9 and NetBeans 6.9.1 tried to place the close PHP tag on the same column as open PHP tag is. Now the formatter treat the open and close PHP tags as html tags.

The second improvement is that the formatter and indentation engine have now better support for alternative syntax.

Some times users wrote me that the formatter worked better in NetBeans 6.8. This is not true. There wasn't a formatter in NetBeans 6.8, there was only indenter. So it "just" moved the beginning of lines.

I don't claim that current formatter is perfect and that the formatter works perfectly. It's not easy task and there will be always cases, when it will no work perfectly. But you can help us to eliminate them.