Groovy/Grails support in soon-to-come NetBeans 6.5

NetBeans 6.5 Milestone 1 is around the corner and the schedule promises a release date in a few months only. Demo extraordinaire Roman announces the integration of the Groovy/Grails plugins in the core of the IDE (not sure how it translates in terms of download bundles) and also tells you about his new job at Sun. Good luck Roman and folks!

( juin 25 2008, 10:41:54 AM CEST ) Permalink Comments [0]

Writing OOo extensions in NetBeans 6.0

I've previously blogged and presented about this feature and it stirred quite a bit of interest, so I'm happy to see this interim release for NetBeans 6.0. Juergen was nice enough to share a preview of this and I've had no trouble whatsoever. Try it out and provide feedback!

( févr. 11 2008, 05:39:29 PM CET ) Permalink

NetBeans 6 fcs pretty soon now

I like having the community vote before shipping a major release. Sounds like NetBeans 6.0 Final is around the corner now... If anything, this one is a major release.

( nov. 26 2007, 05:31:55 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [3]

Is Safari on Windows good for you?
So you start up thinking you'll be able to finer tune your web application on a shiny new browser and it seems you really end up debugging Apple's product instead. Once every so often, Apple releases very buggy software (granted this one is tagged as beta but with iTunes available on Windows for a while you would think they'd get the rendering right).

I like competition, but I don't see how Safari is helping and what it is bringing to Windows other than a content delivery platform for Apple to complement iTunes. I like and use iTunes on Windows but will not install Safari for the time being.

( juin 12 2007, 11:22:01 AM CEST ) Permalink Comments [8]

NetBeans 5.5.1 and GlassFish v2 beta2 make a good couple

NetBeans 5.5.1 was released today. This is the version you need for any GlassFish v2 work.

( mai 24 2007, 04:53:47 PM CEST ) Permalink

Mozilla betting on Hg

(via Laurent). Based on their requirements, the Mozilla.org team is moving to Hg (Mercurial).
OpenSolaris, OpenJDK and soon GlassFish are moving to Hg as well as you probably already know.

( avr. 25 2007, 12:16:43 AM CEST ) Permalink Comments [6]

JRuby for NetBeans bits are live in the public CVS
This time Tor has a little more to show than a screenshot.

( févr. 05 2007, 10:38:18 AM CET ) Permalink

Who said "for the first time I feel like NetBeans is ready for prime time"?
You trust some people more than others because they've been a reference for many years. I've read some of Elliotte Rusty Harold's books (XML in a nutshell, ...), I really like the ideas in XOM (it takes courage to start something like this), I like his contrarian postures (Java interfaces are evil!), and Cafe au Lait Java News and Resources was really my way of reading the technical news before I took the RSS Reader plunge a few years back.

Well, after trying a couple of times in the past, Elliotte has some nice things to say about NetBeans 5.5, its stability, its look-and-feel (all is not good or else it wouldn't be Elharo). Congratulations to the NetBeans team!

( janv. 19 2007, 12:26:46 AM CET ) Permalink

Use NetBeans 5.5.1 when working with GlassFish v2

If you're working with bleeding edge recent GlassFish v2 builds (latest is b31), you should really be using recents builds of NetBeans 5.5.1 (go to the general download section and choose "5.5.1".)

Vince has more on the NetBeans/GlassFish integration.

If you're on the GlassFish 1 branch (Sun AS 9.0), stick to NetBeans 5.5 for now. GlassFish v2 should be in beta by February and final before JavaOne (probably an indication for the NetBeans 5.5.1 schedule).

update : Note there's an Enterprise Pack to go with it in the same download section.
update 2 : You can also use NetBeans 6.0 starting with Milestone 6.

( janv. 12 2007, 05:17:51 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [2]

Why NetBeans 6.0 M5 matters
NetBeans 6.0 Milestone 5 is out with a first drop of the much anticipated new editor infrastructure.
Note that most of the packs are temporarily disabled due to the work needed to move to this new technology and that a Milestone is still bleeding edge stuff...

And of course, there's also Tor's work on the JRuby front.

( nov. 30 2006, 04:18:18 PM CET ) Permalink

F3, Phobos and Shoal
Of course the "Java Libre" news from Sun is this week's big news..
I would also like to point to three new code drops:
- Shoal : JXTA for GlassFish Clustering. Overview here.
- F3 : quite elegant Swing scripting (call it a DSL if you want), an animation library and much more all about to be open sourced.
- Phobos : server-side scripting with development and debug tools and REST & Atom support.

Phobos is being noticed in several places. I'm very curious to see how it plays out.
Actually, all of the abovecould be combined. Kinda fun having Swing on the client and JavaScript on the server....

( nov. 16 2006, 09:16:00 PM CET ) Permalink

99 seconds
Hopefully by now you managed to download NetBeans 5.5 (downloads were a bit sluggish in the first days). Now for the Enterprise Pack (SOA, BPEL, XML Schema, WSDL, ...), if you're like me and feel depressed when presented 1-hour-long presentations, you'll probably like this series of 99 seconds or less videos, from "Creating the BPEL Process" to "Finding Usages of a Schema Component". Enjoy.

( nov. 02 2006, 10:28:57 AM CET ) Permalink

NetBeans 5.5 released (and Visual Web Pack too)!
Well NetBeans 5.5 was scheduled for October 30th. It must be past midnight in Prague and the bits are now available.



This release is all about Java EE 5 support (EJB 3, JPA, JAX-WS 2.0, JSF 1.2) and my favorite feature is the coding tips for Java EE. Martin has a good summary.

NetBeans Visual Web Pack 5.5 Technology Preview has also been released. Other packs are also available: Mobility Pack, Enterprise Pack, Profiler, C/C++ Pack.

Oh, and the netbeans.org website has been redesigned with an enhanced download experience.

( oct. 29 2006, 10:47:21 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [2]

Bye bye NetBeans 5.5
NetBeans 6.0 Milestone 4 is out with all Java EE 5 features and GlassFish support.

( oct. 25 2006, 12:13:09 AM CEST ) Permalink Comments [3]

Developing OpenOffice extensions using Java and NetBeans

(short demos at the end)

You can call Sun people slow when it comes to creating an ecosystem of plugins. NetBeans had a platform years ago, but it's only been a year since it became brain-dead easy to develop on top of it. As the saying goes: better late than never...

Now comes OpenOffice.

Starting with version OpenOffice 2.0.4 (freshly released) which was just released, packaging has evolved (new .oxt extension) and tools (Java for the time being) are now available to help you write code to extend the features of the suite or to interact with a silent instance. If you want to find out more about it, read this. Also, the last OpenOffice Conference in Lyon had a presentation by Jürgen Schmidt on “OpenOffice.org Extensions Infrastructure”. Note that all this applies to StarOffice 8 (Update 4) also.

A couple of weeks back, I needed to write a prototype client to illustrate to end-users the use of a web services protocol (more on that in a later entry). TCP tunnels and technical Swing clients are not what you everyday tool and OpenOffice felt like a better choice. The only problem was the rather bad experience I had a couple of years back trying to get my head around UNO, the IDL language behind (inside) OpenOffice. I briefly tried the Eclipse plugin, but it required too much hand-coding and UNO investment.

I was lucky to test-drive an early version of the NetBeans OpenOffice integration plugin (thank you Steffen and Jürgen!). Here's how it went:

What I simply wanted to do is provide a UI to the user to be able to send to current document using an optimized, reliable, and secure web services protocol (implemented in my case using GlassFish's WSIT). If this document was in Open Document format, I would show the document metadata (properties) and send them over in the payload together with the document.

I decided on using Java 6 because of all the great desktop improvements (most important to me were look-and-feel fidelity and no more gray rectangle) it provides and because obviously Java now has Web Services in the JDK. So here are the ingredients:

- Java 6 SDK (I used build 96)
- OpenOffice 2.0.4 (build 680)
- OpenOffice SDK (same version)
- NetBeans 6 Milestone 3

Java needs to be enabled (this is the default), and OpenOffice should be set to use the proper JRE (this is also where debugging options for the JVM are set) :

Once the OpenOffice NetBeans plugin is installed (get it here), and the OpenOffice and SDK configured (Tools -> Options -> Misc.).

NetBeans now has several new project types: client application, Calc Add-in, UNO component:

You can now develop using Java and Swing (Matisse is yet again a life saver) and build the archive (an .oxt file containing the JAR and XML metadata) or even deploy directly (using a call to the unopkg binary) to the OpenOffice instance (you'll need to restart it to test).

setting up UNO environment ...
build UNO idl files finished
uno-idl-compile:
init:
deps-jar:
jar:
Building jar: D:\dev\PRESTOopenoffice\dist\PRESTOopenoffice.jar
uno-package:
creating UNO extension package ...
Deleting: D:\dev\PRESTOopenoffice\dist\PRESTOopenoffice.oxt
Building zip: D:\dev\PRESTOopenoffice\dist\PRESTOopenoffice.oxt
Copying 1 file to D:\dev\PRESTOopenoffice\dist
uno-deploy:
deploying UNO extension package ...
T:/OpenOffice.org2.0\program\unopkg add -f D:\dev\PRESTOopenoffice\dist\PRESTOopenoffice.oxt
BUILD SUCCESSFUL (total time: 3 seconds)

Installing the extension can also be done manually using the Package Manager from the Tools menu (which is how your users would use it). Note that you can deploy this extension into previous versions of OpenOffice (2.0.x) or StarOffice 8 by changing the extension from .oxt to .uno.pkg.

A Calc Add-In project looks like this:

I will not go into all the details of these files. All I can say is that I happy I don't have to know most of what they do and why they exist.
The CalcAddins.xcu file is key to registering your extension in the OpenOffice UI : a menu item, a toolbar, etc... All this can be conditional and internationalized. The uno-extension-manifest.xml file is very similar to the JAR manifest and points to all the resources needed by the extension (including to file described above and all the Java code).

Once set up, you'll have code completion for com.sun.star.* classes.

Debug
It really felt strange the first time I crashed OpenOffice. I started looking for a stacktrace but couldn't find one. So I ended up setting NetBeans de remote debug the JVM running inside OpenOffice executing my code. To enable debugging, add this line to the Parameters in the above Java options window:
-Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,address=12999,suspend=n
and use Run -> Attach Debugger in NetBeans (the connector is SocketListen and port is 12999 on localhost). You can't step into OpenOffice code at this point, but this proved to be very useful.
   
Tips
- I'm no UNO/OpenOffice expert, so I relied on OO-Snippets (to get the current document path in my case).
- If you really want to mess with .xcu files, make sure NetBeans recognizes them as XML: Tools ->Options ->Advanced ->IDE Configuration ->System ->Object Types ->XML Objects.
- Make sure the .oxt file contains all the Java code you need including libraries (hack the uno-package ANT target if necessary and make sure the manifest has an appropriate entry to reference the library jars relatively using Class-Path:). If you're really in hacking mode, drop library jars in the jre/lib/ext folder.
- If you're crashing OpenOffice all too often, try disabling the auto recovery.
- Looking for standard output: simply start OpenOffice from the command line.

And finally, the small demos :

Using the module in NetBeans.

Installing and using the extension in OpenOffice.

Hopefully this will give you ideas of what can be achieved with OpenOffice and a little bit of Java coding.
I have a few ideas myself, let's see if can find the time to implement.

( oct. 20 2006, 01:44:04 AM CEST ) Permalink Comments [13]