YouTube movie of a preview of jMonkeyEngine Game Development Environment that is being moved to the NetBeans Platform:

Follow the ongoing discussions about this work here.

If you only use a couple of toolbar buttons but do not want to waste the vertical space required to show a regular toolbar - say because you use a smaller laptop screen - you can get NetBeans to insert the buttons into the menu bar.

Just shut down the IDE, then go into the config subdirectory of your NetBeans user directory (location varies; see Help > About). Create a subdirectory Menu, and in it create three files:

1. org-openide-actions-GarbageCollectAction.instance (empty)
2. org-netbeans-modules-quicksearch-QuickSearchAction.instance (empty)
3. .nbattrs containing the text:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <!DOCTYPE attributes PUBLIC "-//NetBeans//DTD DefaultAttributes 1.0//EN"
                "http://www.netbeans.org/dtds/attributes-1_0.dtd">
   <attributes version="1.0">
       <fileobject name="org-openide-actions-GarbageCollectAction.instance">
           <attr name="position" intvalue="9000"/>
       </fileobject>
       <fileobject name="org-netbeans-modules-quicksearch-QuickSearchAction.instance">
           <attr name="position" intvalue="9010"/>
       </fileobject>
   </attributes>
   

After restarting the IDE you should see two new buttons in the menu bar.

RaPSor (Radio Propagation Simulator) is a framework for studying and testing algorithms for ray based simulations, particularly in the area of radio communication.

Anton Epple, Aljoscha Rittner, and myself gave a NetBeans Platform Certified Training during the past 1 1/2 days at the Fachhochschule Weihenstephan, in Freising, Germany. More specifically, we were at the Bioinformatikzentrum, where the students are exploring the NetBeans Platform as the basis of bioinformatics applications:

Of course, they're not the first, at all, to evaluate the NetBeans Platform as the basis of bioinformatics applications, as argued by Toni in Is NetBeans the #1 Bioinformatics Platform?

It was a good time and we plan to keep in touch with the students on the course and to help where necessary in their work with the NetBeans Platform. And tomorrow Toni and I are off to Belgrade to give the same training to the NetBeans User Group Serbia!

There is a new feature that allows navigate to CSS class or id selector declaration from CLASS or ID attribute of an HTML tag. When you go over a usage of  a class or id selector with mouse pointer and the CTRL key is hold, then the selector is change to a link. The link navigates to the declaration. 

The picture below displays the navigation from td tag in an HTML file to the CSS file, where the header_top class selector is defined.

When there are more declarations that fit the selector name, than a popup window is displayed, where you can select the file. The red (unrelated) mark means that there is no direct connection between the usage and the declaration.

As you can see the features works in HTML files and PHP as well.

Building modules and components is not that hard. You "only" have to encapsulate the internal component implementation and expose a clean and easy to use interface. ...at least on paper. In practice you will be confronted with the following challenges in the early iterations:

1. The external interface is too coarse and far less interesting for internal reuse, than you had thought.
2. The interesting things are residing inside the component. They are, however, well encapsulated and not accessible from the outside.

Example: you have two independent components; customermgmt and address / geo-location service. The module customermgmt exposes CRUD services and the address component extensive search capabilities. So far the world is perfect.
Now: a customer has an address - how to model that? The external, customer contract will have to reference the address somehow. That is often modeled as a direct relation between DTOs (just a getter). The external view of the customer component is now dependent on the address component. The implementation is still independent.

The relation between the customer and the address has to be persisted somehow. And now the trouble starts. Now the implementation of the customer component is dependent on the address component - because of direct (JPA) link between both modules. Now the internal implementation *and* the component contract are dependent on each other.

You are using JPA 1.0 - and your database experts just don't want to introduce an additional mapping table between the customer and the address. So you have to model a bi-directional relation between the customer entity and the address (introducing a back-link with a mappedBy attribute). Now you get a bidirectional dependency between the implementation of your component - the external dependency of the customer can remain unidirectionally dependent on the address. This is only true if you are using DTOs.

So you get two components which should be independent of each others, but are actually tightly coupled. Your modules have to expose everything - if you are using Java EE 6 - the DTOs and JPA-entities are dependent of each other - probably only the very thin boundary may remain independent. In practice you will get e.g. an invoice module in addition, which will be dependent on both the customer and the address....

You can do the following to "improve" the situation:

1. Factor out all entities into a common package. Often called "domain", "model" or even "common". Such a common package is not cohesive (it contains multiple business concepts) and also not very good to maintain (the generic names have nothing to do with the actual business). This approach looks great ...on paper.
2. Drop JPA-relations and introduce proxy-objects, which contain the ID and can be resolved on demand. This will significantly increase the amount of code and will hit your performance. You will be not able to use joins...
3. Allow bidirectional friend-dependencies between modules. In that case it will be hard to introduce a framework like OSGi, jigsaw or something else. But you can still put all "business components" into few modules. Then the real benefit of OSGi, Jigsaw etc is questionable.
4. Remove OR-mappers and go with "plain" JDBC. Let the DB handle the dependencies for you. In most cases this is not really a maintainable option.

Dependencies between persistent objects from different modules are practically not existing in other domains like IDEs, servers or plugins, but are the standard case in enterprise projects.
So, you shouldn't kill any OSGi project - you should implement some typical use cases (PoCs) with modularity solution of your choice before the project really starts. This is actually independent of any framework like OSGi, jigsaw or EMS (esoteric module system) :-).

[See also "Real World Java EE Patterns, Rethinking Best Practices" book, Page 267, (Monolithic or Loosely Coupled?) for more in-depth discussion]

Is there anything like universal architecture rules? For a while I am seeking for ones and today it is the right time to share my findings. They are not complete, but join me with your comments on this discovery journey.

--JaroslavTulach 19:29, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

The virtual conference that was held for the launch of Java EE 6 and GlassFish v3 is now being progressively being pushed out to the GlassFish Podcast. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast to catch all 16 presentations :

Java EE 6, GlassFish v3, EJB 3.1, JAX-RS/Jersey, Servlet 3.0, JPA 2.0, JSF 2.0, JAX-WS/Metro, CDI, Modularity with OSGi, Dynamic languages in GlassFish v3, Java EE 6 Tooling, the Grizzly framework, GlassFish management and monitoring, and Java EE 6 Connectors.

I'll be releasing the episode once every 2 days or so to let your favorite podcatcher get some rest between each.

I've found a couple issues when using NetBeans to generate a WSDL file for an EE 6 web service, and then customizing that WSDL file. Some other users have reported them as well, so I thought I'd share them with the community.

DbWrench, which is database design and synchronization software, is clearly an application created on top of the NetBeans Platform:

And, someone out there is making money on the NetBeans Platform in this case, since purchasing this application will cost you $145, while a trial version is also available.

Quite a lot of work seems to have gone into this application, primarily in the porting from a previous incarnation (shown here):

Must be nice, as a developer of this application, to suddenly have a free docking framework out of the box. :-)

Note: Nowhere on the DbWrench website will you see a reference to the NetBeans Platform. Nothing wrong with that. But it clearly means that it's hard to make an estimate about the actual popularity of the NetBeans Platform. However, from the screenshots page one can safely conclude that the NetBeans Platform is broadly adopted across all sectors developing industrial software applications.

Many thanks to Andrea Cisternino for identifying this application as yet another NetBeans Platform application! Others out there? Let me know!

Yesterday morning the USERS mailing list of GlassFish had a thread asking How to start and run GlassFishV3 without Netbeans... so, Alexis wrote and posted a quick Survival Guide on using GlassFish without an IDE . From question to documentation in a few hours: self-publishing, no webmaster to contact, all links to online documentation... and no lawyer to check with :-)

Here's where I am with my OpenOffice integration on the NetBeans Platform: OpenOffice opens in a TopComponent and I've copied a bunch of code into the document. Clearly, that's what one would hope to have as a result of this integration. Problems that remain are that the document isn't editable, the heavyweight/lightweight thing, and when I close the window OpenOffice crashes.

Indeed.COM shows a spike in the number of GlassFish-related jobs around end of January (snapshot, live); the date roughly coincides with the reassuring noises from Oracle on CiC. The absolute job numbers are still small, but I expect them to continue to grow, specially as we release our detailed Roadmap. In other good adoption indicators: • Mail traffic at USERS@GlassFish ; see MarkMail • Google Trends (snapshot, live).

And, before you ask; the roadmap is very close...

R.I.P. Felipe Gaúcho: DZone MVB & Tireless Java Advocate The DZone team was very sad to read the news that Felipe Gaúcho had passed away this weekend. Felipe has been an active member of JavaLobby for many years, as well as being a key JUG leader.

A lot of people experiment GlassFish for the first time via an IDE (most likely NetBeans, but maybe also with Eclipse) and feel a bit lost when it comes to use GlassFish without the tool driving it for them. So here are a few (mostly basic) CLI asadmin hints for GlassFish v3 :

* Start/Stop *
Start GlassFish (need this to access the admin console on default port http://localhost:4848) :
     % GLASSFISH_HOME/bin/asadmin start-domain     (assumes there's only one domain)
     % asadmin start-domain domain1     (explicitly reference a given domain)
     % asadmin start-domain -v domain     (will cause the log to be dumped to the standard output)
     % java -jar modules/glassfish.jar     (may be useful in certain circumstance (explicit java version for instance)

Stop GlassFish :
     % asadmin stop-domain {domain1}

List existing instances (including stopped/started status)
     % asadmin list-domains

You can also create additional domains with % asadmin create-domain ... (and I would suggest using the -portbase option).

* Resources *
If the IDE has created connection pools and datasources, you will certainly find the following create-jdbc-connection-pool and create-jdbc-resource commands useful. Note also that asadmin has a "closest match" feature for misspelled commands and extensive online documentation :
% ~/glassfishv3/bin/asadmin create
CLI001 Invalid Command: create
Closest matching local and remote command(s):
     create-admin-object
     create-audit-module
     create-auth-realm
     create-connector-connection-pool
     create-connector-resource
     create-connector-security-map
     create-connector-work-security-map
     create-custom-resource
     create-domain
     create-file-user
     create-http
     create-http-listener
     create-iiop-listener
     create-javamail-resource
     create-jdbc-connection-pool
     create-jdbc-resource
     create-jms-host
     create-jms-resource
     create-jmsdest
     create-jndi-resource
     create-jvm-options
     create-lifecycle-module
     create-message-security-provider
     create-network-listener
     create-password-alias
     create-profiler
     create-protocol
     create-resource-adapter-config
     create-resource-ref
     create-service
     create-ssl
     create-system-properties
     create-threadpool
     create-transport
     create-virtual-server

Almost every bits of configuration is located in the glassfish/domains/domain1/config/domain.xml config file but you really should be using asadmin or the admin console and not edit this by hand.

* (auto)deployment *
The explicit deployment is based on the asadmin deploy app.{ear|war|jar} command. Listing deployed applications is as easy as asadmin list-application (notice how GlassFish tells you which containers are at work for a given app), and undeployment simply requires a asadmin undeploy app-name.

While these commands have lots of options (asadmin deploy --help for details), you may find it convenient to simply drop your application in the domain1/autodeploy directory. Deleting the file will trigger the undeployment.

All the details for the asadmin CLI can be found in the official "Using the asadmin Utility" documentation.

Hi, today it will be again a very short blog post about a feature we just added to the development version of NetBeans. Many of you requested this change so we hope that you will like this change:

The behavior should be as expected, it means that if one checks a directory, all folders and files underneath the directory are checked as well.

However, if anyone of you still prefer the current dialog (a "table"), start NetBeans with -J-Dnb.php.transfer.ui.table=true and leave a comment why do you think it's better, an option could be added for it (probably in Tools > Options > PHP).

That's all for today, as always, please test it and report all the issues or enhancements you find in NetBeans IssueZilla (component php, subcomponent FTP Support).

First step to integrating OpenOffice into the NetBeans Platform (yes, trying that again) is to get it working outside of the NetBeans Platform.

I started by downloading NetBeans IDE 6.5, installed the OpenOffice.org API plugin, then moved the OfficeBean sample from the OpenOffice SDK into the OpenOffice Client project type which I then opened in a NetBeans IDE 6.9 development build:

Running it, I see this:

The next step is to open OpenOffice via the OfficeBean into a NetBeans Platform TopComponent. This blog entry will probably be very useful.

OSGi focusses on modularity and it is right now (future may change it) the only viable way to split your application into modules with well-defined dependencies. It solves, however, "only" the technical problem - which is actually relatively easy. Before you going to introduce OSGi into your project, answer the following questions:

1. What is your versioning scheme for modules(bundles)? Do you care about minor versions, major versions etc?
2. Whats your scm strategy - do you plan to open and maintain a branch for every version of a module? How many branches do you plan to maintain? (with svn? :-))
3. How many versioned modules will be active at the same time in production?
4. How the system is going to be tested? Each module and all the combination of modules. Every version will increase the complexity significantly.
5. What is your release-management strategy? Do you really plan to provide customer-specific module combinations? What is your bug-fixing / patch strategy (trunk, branch)?
6. Do you really want to replace modules in running system? If it is a serverside system - what happens with in-flight transactions?
7. If it is an Eclipse-RCP application - are you even allowed to expose the plugins to the end-user? (in the majority of my projects, we had to disable the update manager in production :-))
8. What is your software distribution system - many companies have already a software-distribution system in place. Often not only the application, but also the JVM are packaged into one binary file and entirely installed. Incremental updates are often impossible.
9. What is exactly the contract between the modules? Only a Java-Interface? If so - what to do with direct relations between JPA-entities. If you disallow direct JPA-relations - you will probably see a huge "domain" package with all domain objects inside it. You will need to provide "friend" relations between modules as well.
10. Is maven the canonical representation of modules, OSGi, or both? A single representation would be the best. Will maven module versions be reflected in the OSGi bundle versions?

The major OSGi-challenge is not the technology, rather than the governance of your modules and bundles. The problem is very similar to SOA.

For most enterprise applications you will get only one variant of your business logic, or even UI - so you will end up with modules, which will probably never be replaced. Because of additional complexity - you will probably test and deliver the whole system at once.

If you are building an IDE, platform or a server - governance, modularization and versioning are a major part of your problem domain / functional requirements. You will have to solve that anyway. It is far more likely, that someone will have to install a new driver to an application server, or even maintain different versions of the driver at the same time. IDEs without plugins are also extremely rare.

Replacing an algorithm in a business application is far more uncommon - often even not allowed. Its just crazy to introduce a modularization solution and then not use it.

[See also "Real World Java EE Patterns, Rethinking Best Practices" book, Page 253, (Premature Encapsulation Is the Root of All Evil) for more in-depth discussion]

Our friend Felipe Gaúcho died of a heart attack this last Friday . Felipe was one of the founders of CEJUG, the Ceará JUG, and created the Premio Universitario Java. You probably know Felipe from his active blog where he covered many topics - his last post was just Thursday. I last saw Felipe during JavaOne - full of enthusiasm as always - and we had exchanged email this Tuesday; we will all miss him sorely. Many other people also had the luck to work with him - see the notes from Hildeberto, PeterP, Claudio and Kevin.

My condolences to Felipe's family. If you knew Felipe, please consider leaving a comment in the CEJUG Notice.

Great News,

To my surprise, upon installing Netbeans 6.9, I find the woodstock plugins back inside and working great. This is amazingly good news for us as we are often building complex screens and laying it out in raw, naked jsp is just too much and too time consuming!

Great Job!

Now – perhaps we should get back to supporting it somehow?

I will spend few hours in Gothenburg at the SDC 2010 conference and give a talk with the title "Lightweight Killer Apps with Nothing But Vanilla Java EE 6". I'm really curious whether my first slide will look familiar to you - people outside Sweden are thinking, that it is the Golden Gate Bridge, what is entirely wrong.

I will have some time after the session. So if you have some questions, want to discuss, or hack some code - just ping me. I planned to spend more time in Gothenburg - a really nice city. Because of the project (over)load, probably caused by the general Java EE 6 take off :-), - I will only spend few hours.

An interesting URL: http://www.sun.com/ponytails. It gets resolved to: http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/. Now the question - why ponytail? :-)

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/

If you've been looking through the last few development builds of the upcoming NetBeans IDE 6.9, this'll not be news to you:

Yes, you'll be able to use the IDE to generate the installers of your NetBeans Platform applications.

After making a selection in the above dialog, you'll right-click on the application's project node in the Projects window and then choose this menu item:

And then, after a few moments, you'll have a new installer ready to be distributed to your end users:

The installer is created on the same infrastructure as the installer used by NetBeans IDE, so you'll not be surprised at the result:

In the end, your users will have your application installed via this installer generated by NetBeans IDE.

The one remaining question I have is to what extent the installer can be customized—can the icon be changed, can the text be modified, can additional panels be added to the generated installer? Hoping to find out soon.

1. January: In The Age Of DRYness - Do We Really Need Naming Conventions For Interfaces? (11288 Views)
2. February: DAOs Aren't Dead - But They Either Collapsed Or Disappeared (9565 reads)
3. March: What You Can Build In 50 Minutes With Java EE 5/6? (25942 views)
4. April: Lean service architectures with Java EE 6 - And EJB 3 in particular (4304 views)
5. May: Netbeans 6.7 Beta + Maven = Heaven (more than promising) (11697 views)
6. June: Real World Java EE Patterns - Rethinking Best Practices Book And Project (15456 views)
7. July: Lean Java EE 6 Without Spring And Spring 3.0 In Java EE 6 World: Summary and Conclusion (eJug Session) (16203 views)
8. August: Value Object vs. Data Transfer Object (VO vs. DTO) (15928 views)
9. September: Why Oracle Should Continue To Push NetBeans (18974 views)
10. October: (JSF + JPA) - EJB = Bloat (17436 views)
11. November: Two Amazing NetBeans 6.8Beta Features (8877 views)
12. December: Java FX Composer / Designer for NetBeans 6.8 - First Smoke Test (15276 views)

The purpose of any IDE is to maximize productivity and support seamless development from a single tool. This reference document describes useful code assistance features, customization options, and navigation capabilities of the NetBeans IDE's Java Editor, which is free and open source. Most of these features have been available in versions earlier than NetBeans IDE 6.8. However, this guide has...

The breadth and depth of the community is nicely illustrated by the variety of recent GlassFish-related blog posts. First, long time GlassFish supporter Masoud has a very detailed (it's actually a chapter of a book) OpenMQ from A to Z entry. On the operations side, Byron has a set of two posts on How to Run GlassFish V3 as a Service on Linux Ubuntu/Debian and a follow-up on using a non-root Service (see also thisGentoo variation by Jason), while Felipe's on provisioning GlassFish v3 resources with asadmin. In the "nice words" category, Juliano has a nicely written "Java Enterprise Development - 2010 style" piece and Maksim says "GlassFish is becoming new de facto standard in Java applications. Development with new GlassFish v3 server and Eclipse now is really fast and comfortable. Server starts within a second, JEE6 is fully supported and hot code replacement works as it should.".

On the Java EE 6 and web tier side we have Bobby sharing a tool for exploring the platform, Aleksey discussing a "Grizzly 2.0: simple authentication example", while Justin puts GlassFish embedded to work with Wicket. Rene has a two-part article on running a Java EE 6 Client Application with Netbeans 6.8 and GlassFish V3 - Part 1: Creating a Basic Application and Part 2: Enhancing and Deploying the Application while Jacob goes through the simple setup to have GlassFish and Intellij 9 work together.

So while we wait for the GlassFish roadmap, we've seen one of the busiest month ever for February on the user mailing list and this recent message from the GlassFish Product Management "GlassFish, and by extension, Metro, are strategic Oracle products". Exciting times ahead!

If you’re a java developer in Serbia have a look here:

NetBeans Training at Faculty of Organisational Sciences NetBeans User Group Serbia.

It’s the first time I’ll be in Belgrade. The NetBeans User Group there looks like a really nice bunch:

http://www.netbeans-serbia.org/

The training is on March 13 - 15. So we’ve got plenty of time to do workshops and hands-on trainings… Geertjan and I are looking forward to meet you there.

Looking forward to a trip to Belgrade next week, together with Toni, where the local NetBeans group will be porting Neuroph to the NetBeans Platform. Here's their page:

URL: http://www.netbeans-serbia.org/

Note: We'll be delivering a NetBeans Platform Certified Training there, i.e., at the University of Belgrade. Have you had a look at our large library of NetBeans Platform training slides? You're free to use them yourself to deliver trainings, either for fun or for profit.

If you've been following my blog on java.net, you'll know that I've completed the Mavenization of the blueMarine Core. It's refreshing to see the thing running again, together with the new software factory, after so much work. In fact, I started the conversion to Maven about nine months ago. Of course, I wasn't working on it fulltime and I had to learn a lot of new things, also related to the...