NetBeans Support Weblog: Tips , Tricks, Techniques and more

Seam Support

Seam is not directly supported in NetBeans 6.0 though it is fairly straight forward to manually set up support for seam as described in this FAQ.

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Is there TestNg support in NetBeans 6.0?

NetBeans 6.0 and previous versions did not directly support TestNg. 

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There is more help now for migrating to NetBeans 6.0.  If you are trying to migrate from Sun Java Studio Enterprise and/or Sun Java Studio Creator to NetBeans 6.0, Sun Microsystems, Inc is offering free migration help for up to six months. For more details see:

Migration from Sun Java Studio Enterprise and/or Sun Java Studio Creator to NetBeans 6.0.

Please note, this offer expires June 3, 2008.

Of course, you can continue taking advantage of the other various support resources as listed here:

Support Resources.

In NetBeans most of the program code is generated  when you dropping pre-defined JavaServer Faces components from the Palette onto the visual designer. The same is true when you drag and drop the image HyperLink component to the visual designer page.  However, sometimes you need to be able to do this dynamically.

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Sun Microsystems just announced the completion of MySQL acquisition. Sun and MySQL executives are launching the Sun-MySQL world tour in March.  Check out the details and schedule  at  Sun and MySQL Around the world

Also, very exciting for MySQL fans is the unveiling of the complete  MySQL's portfolio of products.
Free downloads are available at http://www.sun.com/software/products/mysql/getit.jsp

For NetBeans users I highly recommend the Demo of NetBeans IDE & MySQL with Roman Strobl.  I found it very useful myself.

Creating Mutliline Header Table using JSF in the NetBeans IDE 6.0

 To do this you need to use "Nested <webuijsf:tableColumn> tags".

Before we get into the steps , here is a bit of info.

1) At this time, Creating Multiple Header/Footer Rows cannot be done by setting some property etc for the table component in the IDE (i.e cannot be done visually). It requires manual tweaking with the JSP/JSF code of the page.
2) Also once the tweaks are made the table does not render in the design view of the IDE. You have to deploy and run the application to see the results.
3) There are limitations to the type of headers you can create/what tags attributes you can use etc, see http://webdev2.sun.com/woodstock-tlddocs/webuijsf/tableColumn.html  for details ...
 

 

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A lot of users want to be able to design their own Page Layouts, and  easily reuse the same across their application or even multiple applications. Basically designing  layouts once and then using them in many pages. In such a scenario it will be easy to have your own page layout design accessible through the wizard in the IDE.  I tried  the instructions which Winston Prakash  published in  his blog entry titled How to create NetBeans Visual Web Page Layout Plugin. It shows you how to add your own predefined Page Layout as a template, so that it appears in the New Visual Web Page Wizard. Now you can simply choose your own template and create your page based on that template.  A interesting observation in Winston's blog is that if you are using NB 6.1 (M1), you need not have to replace all component binding with template binding. This is so because the bindings are not inserted by default . In NB6.1(M1), the mandatory binding for every component in the page have been removed. This saves a lot of time !

Before you try this, you have to first of course create your Page Layouts. Here's the tutorial to do that
Creating a CSS-based Fixed Page Layout .

For those who would like to have some already predefined Page layout Templates accessible through the wizard, check out the the NB 6.0 plugin for Predefined Visual Web Page Layouts , which you can simply download and install in NetBeans. By installing this plugin you can access the different pagelayouts  through the wizard and resuse.

The Solaris Express Developer Edition 1/08 (SXDE 01/08) comes with NetBeans 6.0  IDE . Also, since SXDE 01/08 also offers the Web Stack as part of the install it is more inviting for developers to consider it their platform of choice. The Web Stack is compromised of  the AMP (Apache, MySQL, and PHP) a collection of open source software to build and deploy web application on Solaris. You do not need to download these separately.  Now you can use NetBeans6.0 with the Web Stack .  The neat feature is you can access all the applications from the Launch menu, including  NetBeans. Below I am describing how to develop a Web Application using the Web Stack with NetBeans 6.0 .
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Check out the first of the series of articles on JavaFX, published on java.sun.com. The series is entitled "Creating Rich Internet Applications with Compiled JavaFX Script Technology". There will be 18 articles in this series, and the focus is the JavaFX Script programming language. Anyone learning to use JavaFX Script technology will find this very useful. Specifically it will help learn to create a compiled JavaFX program that contains user interface components and 2D graphics. The topics covered in the first article starts with obtaining the JavaFX Script Compiler. So if you are a beginner, you can get started easily.

Can I run NetBeans ide using one version of jdk but target other versions of jdk?[Read More]

Again experimenting with the JavaFX code, this time learning to connect to the database.  I was dabbling with connecting to JavaDB database using JavaFX back in September, just did not get around to putting it on my blog.[Read More]

Plugin Providers for NetBeans 6.0

How does one find out where a plugin comes from? And how do we contact the plugin owners?

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The Visual Web JSF Development features have gone through quite a bit of branding and packaging changes over the last few years from Creator to Visual Web Pack to being available intergrated out of the box with netbeans.

There are a lot of useful resources available to help developers using these features, Here is a collection of links to those.[Read More]

'userdir' is the directory where NetBeans stores user configuration data such as window layouts, editor settings, menu and toolbar customizations and various module settings.

At times your IDEs userdir gets corrupted and this results in the IDE behaving weirdly like

1) In the New Project dialog, sometimes only a few of the categories are listed.
2) Your Project does not open properly, you get errors like "Project Folder Already exist" etc
3) You get an exception window on IDE startup etc.

To fix such issues, run the ide with a fresh userdir.[Read More]

The acquisition of MySQL by Sun Microsystems  is great news, especially for NetBeans users. If you have not already seen Jonathan's blog today, I encourage you to read all about it in "Helping Dolphins Fly".  Of particular interest to me from support perspective is the piece on MySQL support. Quoting from Jonathan's Blog:

"So what are we announcing today? That in addition to acquiring MySQL, Sun will be unveiling new global support offerings into the MySQL marketplace. We'll be investing in both the community, and the marketplace - to accelerate the industry's phase change away from proprietary technology to the new world of open web platforms."

 I read this as great news for NetBeans users. So stay tuned for more on MySQL. In the meanwhile here are some links to tutorials and guides for using MySQL in NetBeans IDE:

 MySQL Home

Connecting to a MySQL Database in NetBeans IDE

Making a simple MySQL client in NetBeans

Creating a Simple Web Application in NetBeans IDE Using MySQL