Planet NetBeans

NetBeans DZone: Perforce For NetBeans

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:40:15 +0000

Until Perforce creates its own VCS client for the NetBeans Platform, Tutuianu Aurelian will continue developing his contribution to the open source community: PerforceNB - a Perforce client for NetBeans. Aurelian has been developing in NetBeans since its name was Forte. Using the NetBeans Platform API for integrating a versioning system into the IDE, Aurelian implemented a Perforce client as...

NetBeans DZone: Ray Simulation Analysis on the NetBeans Platform

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:12:33 +0000

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

Adam Bien: Modules, Cycles, Unwanted Friends - The Modularity Challenges In Enterprise Projects

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:32:19 +0000

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:

The external interface is too coarse and far less interesting for internal reuse, than you had thought.
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:

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.
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...
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.
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]

APIDesign - Blogs: Ever met an architect?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:29:00 +0000

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)

NetBeans DZone: WSDL Customization Issues and Workarounds in Java EE 6 Applications in NetBeans

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:36:41 +0000

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.

NetBeans DZone: OpenOffice on the NetBeans Platform on Ubuntu

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:36:36 +0000

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.

NetBeans DZone: R.I.P. Felipe Gaúcho: DZone MVB & Tireless Java Advocate

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:13:56 +0000

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.

Adam Bien: How To Kill An OSGi Project - With 10 Questions

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:28:52 +0000

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:

What is your versioning scheme for modules(bundles)? Do you care about minor versions, major versions etc?
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? :-))
How many versioned modules will be active at the same time in production?
How the system is going to be tested? Each module and all the combination of modules. Every version will increase the complexity significantly.
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)?
Do you really want to replace modules in running system? If it is a serverside system - what happens with in-flight transactions?
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 :-))
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.
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.
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]

Netbeans for the Coffee Drinker » Netbeans: Netbeans 6.9…. Woodstock is BACK!

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:50:04 +0000

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?

Adam Bien: Killing Some Bloat in Gothenburg - With Java EE 6

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 21:28:55 +0000

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.

Adam Bien: What Is www.sun.com/ponytails/ ?

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 11:51:31 +0000

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

Allan Lykke Christensen » NetBeans: LDAP Explorer 0.4 released

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/

Adam Bien: Best of 2009 - Most Popular Posts (Dead DAOs, Bloat Without EJBs, Java EE vs. Spring, VOs vs. DTOs)

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:56:49 +0000

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

The views above are monthly results - not overall views. The actual number should be much higher. RSS/Atom-Feed results are not even included in this statistic. The daily average ranged from 4.5k - 8k.

The stats for the year 2010 are more than promising. February is already the best month ever. Thanks for reading and especially the constructive 2.5k (!) comments.

NetBeans DZone: NetBeans IDE Java Editor Reference Guide

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:20:48 +0000

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...

Toni Epple: NetBeans Platform Training in Belgrade

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:57:26 +0000

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.

NetBeans DZone: What's the Best Way to Mavenize a Large NetBeans Platform Application?

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:34:03 +0000

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...

NetBeans DZone: On the NetBeans Platform Build System (Part 4)

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:08:55 +0000

In part 1 and part 2 and part 3 of this series, you were introduced to various topics relating to the NetBeans Platform build system by Hermien Pellissier, from Saab Systems Grintek in Johannesburg (read about their NetBeans Platform work for the South African National Defence Force here).

NetBeans DZone: How to Create a Tabbed Toolbar on the NetBeans Platform

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:01:57 +0000

One of the many enviable features of the Maltego client, the NetBeans Platform app that is part of some very powerful intelligence gathering software, is its really cool tabbed toolbar:

NetBeans DZone: Rewritten NetBeans Platform Paint Application in NetBeans IDE 6.9

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:14:38 +0000

Tim Boudreau has rewritten parts of the NetBeans Platform Paint Application (which is a NetBeans Platform sample distributed with NetBeans IDE). The changed Paint Application (together with updated tutorial) will be part of the release of NetBeans IDE 6.9. Two parts have changed significantly, both relating to the "Save" feature of the Paint application, all of it within the...

NetBeans DZone: On the NetBeans Platform Build System (Part 3)

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:35:33 +0000

In part 1 and part 2 of this series, Hermien Pellissier, from Saab Systems Grintek in Johannesburg (read about their work for the South African National Defence Force here), discussed the structure of the NetBeans Platform build system. In this part, she addresses three related areas that you should be aware of when working with the NetBeans Platform build system.

mkleint: The little things

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:17:58 +0000

A way back I've written myself a small application to make geocaching easier to manage. It downloads geocache information, converts to gpx format (some sort of xml understood by the GPS device) and then writes to the GPS device - (Garmin Colorado) via USB. It's not really an application I'm proud of, it's full of hacks and the UI is also of stone age usability, but so far I wasn't able to find a better one.
Anyway, my wife suggested I install the app on her computer as well, so that she can upload a cache even when I'm not around. I've always run the app from command line or from the IDE, but that's not something I want my wife to go though :) Since she has a Mac laptop, I've looked into how to generate a Mac natively executable binary. It was easier than I though thanks to the wide and deep reservoir of Apache Maven plugins around. There is one for Mac applications as well - osxappbundle-maven-plugin. A simple copy&paste into my pom and there we have a nice geocaching.dmg file with the geocaching.app application. Great. The biggest obstacle turned out to be creation of the *.icns file with a custom icon for the application. It's created by the Icon Composer application (at /Developer/Applications/Utilities/Icon Composer) and it took me a while that it doesn't accept gif files but tiff image files. It's great when things just work and work in 15 minutes time..

And we've visited this geocache afterwards. A great trip.

NetBeans DZone: Over 60 New Hints in the NetBeans IDE 6.9 Java Editor

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 10:41:32 +0000

The picture on the left shows the list of Java hint categories in NetBeans IDE 6.8, while on the right you see the list that will be part of NetBeans IDE 6.9: As can be seen, not only has the list been alphabetized, but it has also been extended. I'm told there are over 60 new hints in the Java editor.

Adam Bien: Oracle Data Sheet About ...Glassfish

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 09:34:43 +0000

"...Oracle GlassFish Server is part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware application grid portfolio and is ideally suited for applications requiring lightweight infrastructure with the most up-to-date implementation of enterprise Java, Java EE 6, and Java Web services. Oracle GlassFish Server complements Oracle WebLogic Server, which is designed to run the broader portfolio of Oracle Fusion Middleware and large-scale enterprise applications..." Read the whole paper.

NetBeans DZone: Next Phase for NetBeans PoWeR

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 12:49:00 +0000

NetBeans PoWeR is a semi-experimental initiative about providing pre-cooked NBM artifacts for the NetBeans Platform, wrapping some popular third-party libraries (it's a similar concept as Eclipse Orbit, and I think that it's an important missing point of our community). Article Type: How-to

Allan Lykke Christensen » NetBeans: LDAP Explorer 0.3 and NetBeans Doxia Support

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:

Adam Bien: Jigsaw / JDK 1.7 will be the solution for 80% of the modularization challenges

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:00:58 +0000

Jigsaw will come with JDK 1.7 and is now part of the openjdk project and so opensource. Other JDK implementations could simply reuse it.It will become interesting, because:

It will be shipped with every Oracle / Sun JDK 1.7 (at least it was the plan)
Jigsaw will partition JDK 1.7 and will be loaded before most of the rt.jar code. So is already there - no reason to introduce another framework
Its pragmatic: you can split packages across modules. Package splitting isn't a best practice, but makes the incremental modularization of legacy projects a lot easier
Modules are loaded statically - no reloading. This is good enough for the most projects. Its funny - but in most NetBeans RCP / Eclipse RCP projects we had to deactivate the ability to load modules dynamically in production :-). Server operators don't like dynamic behavior either.
It seems like there will be only one classloader, which will load all modules. This will eliminate majority of NoClassDefFoundErrors.
javac will be jigsaw aware - this is a major advantage. Module dependencies should be checked as early as possible - it fits well with the nature of Java.
Jigsaw should increase the classloading performance and significantly reduce the size of the jars and so the deployment

In perfect (spherical) shape: How to create a simple Naked Objects Application in NetBeans

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:47:40 +0000

Naked Objects is an open source application framework that lets you concentrate on domain objects and automagically generates a GUI for interacting with them. This sounds (and actually is) very interesting, as the domain is what we should most interested in, instead of boilerplate, as everybody who is fond of DDD knows.

Being NetBeans my favourite IDE, as you might have suspected, I'll try to jot down some notes on how to use it to create a very simple Naked Objects application.

First things first, you have to download the Naked Objects framework; you have various options, I chose to download the zip file for Ant. After unzipping the file you should find a folder named lib that contains - o great wonder and surprise - all the necessary libs.

As I suppose I could use all this stuff in more than one project, I created a new library in NetBeans:

Click on the New Library... button and you'll be prompted a library name and type

Then click on the Add Jar/Folder... button and add all the jars in the lib folder. You should get something like this:

Ok, now we can proceed to creating a new application. As a disclaimer, this is not necessarily the best way to do it, but it is how my inner cogs work (or don't work). If yours are different, you'll have to compose all the pieces of the puzzle in a different order.

Let's suppose we want to use the DnD GUI, so I go with a new Java Application:

Click on the Next> button and enter a name for your project; don't use a dedicated folder for libraries and don't have the IDE create a main class for you.

Click on the Finish button. Ok, now we should instruct our project to be a Naked Object Application. Right click the Libraries node to add all necessary references:

Select the library you've previosly created and you're almost ready to go.

Now, if you try to run the application NetBeans complains because you have not chosen a Main Class. Right click the project node and the Run node in the Categories tree, and insert org.nakedobjects.runtime.NakedObjects as the Main Class.

Click on the OK button. Ok, now we can try to run the application... just to get another complain


Exception in thread "main" org.nakedobjects.metamodel.commons.exceptions.NakedObjectException: failed to load 'nakedobjects.properties'; tried using: [file system (directory 'config'), file system (directory
      'src/main/webapp/WEB-INF'), context loader classpath]

It seems fair... after all we have to provide some configuration. Create a new properties file, name it nakedobjects and put it in the config folder. Obviously this is not enough, and you can check it yourself trying to run the application: NetBeans will complain again (don't shoot the messenger) about the lack of services.

To define services, we have to write some code. Let's suppose we want to deal with all Walt Disney characters - I hope there are no legal issues with this - so let's create a class that represents one:


package it.moz.noapp;

import org.nakedobjects.applib.AbstractDomainObject;
import org.nakedobjects.applib.annotation.DescribedAs;
import
      org.nakedobjects.applib.annotation.MemberOrder;

@DescribedAs("Character")
public class Character extends AbstractDomainObject {

private String firstname;
private String lastName;

@MemberOrder(sequence = "1")
public String getFirstname() {
resolve(firstname);
return firstname;
}

public void setFirstname(String firstname) {
this.firstname = firstname;
objectChanged();
}

@MemberOrder(sequence = "2")
public String getLastName() {
resolve(lastName);
return lastName;
}

public void setLastName(String lastName) {
this.lastName = lastName;
objectChanged();
}

public String title() {
return getFirstname() + " " + getLastName();
}
}

Notice how this class, that is a domain object, extends the class AbstractDomainObject provided by the framework. The annotation @DescribedAs tells you how the object will be referred to in the GUI, while @MemberOrder defines the order in which members are presented. You can find every detail on the Naked Objects website.

The next step is telling our application that such a domain object exists, so we'll add the following line in our nakedobject.properties file:

nakedobjects.services=repository#it.moz.noapp.Character

Ok, let's start the application...

uh oh... User name and password? ehrm... let's provide the application with them! The problem is that if you want to add an empty file - unlike for properties files - NetBeans asks you whether you want to add it to the src folder or to the test folder, i.e. the folders (already) defined in the project. As you want neither, you must manually add an empty passwords file to the config folder. Before complaining about NetBeans, keep in mind that you can always define the config folder as a new source package folder, but let's skip this option.

Fill in a username and a password...

user:pass

And that's it, you can start your application!

To create a new instance you right-click the Characters icon and select the appropriate item from the drop down list, insert the desired values and here's your brand new character. Rinse and repeat and you'll get something like this:

As you can see, you now have a Disney Character directory without having written a single line of code but your domain class.

Unluckily, if you close your application all your efforts have been vain, so you should add the support for persistence. But this will be the subject for another post...

APIDesign - Blogs: Know it Better!

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:40:00 +0000

Based on classical SuperVsInner example I'd like to formulate one important advice to follow when designing an API.

--JaroslavTulach 12:40, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

NetBeans DZone: NetBeans Weekly News (Issue 428 - Feb 23, 2010)

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:59:04 +0000

Calendar Webinar: JPA 2.0 with MySQL - February 23 Join Java Evangelist Arun Gupta and Senior Architect Linda DeMichiel for a free MySQL webinar: “Using the Latest Java Persistence API 2.0 Features with MySQL", on Tuesday, 23 February at 10am US Pacific time.

NetBeans DZone: Healthcare Quality Assurance Application on the NetBeans Platform

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 16:23:30 +0000

One area where the NetBeans Platform, the world's only modular Swing application framework, is well suited is as the basis of an enterprise's internal quality testing tools. In Semiconductor Validation Engineering on the NetBeans Platform, you can read how engineers at PMC Sierra have created Swing applications on the NetBeans Platform to validate PMC Sierra's semiconductor products.