David Botterill's Weblog

Tuesday April 08, 2008

Improved NetBeans Plugin Portal

I just pushed a new version of the Plugin Portal.  This version has lots of new features.  The most important feature is the ability to reguest that your plugin gets verified for a version of NetBeans.  If the plugin is verified, it will show up in the "Plugin Portal".  I've also fixed some issues that most people will be very happy about.  You can now hit the "Enter" key when logging in or searching.  I know this seemed like an easy fix but believe me finding out how to do this was not easy.  I'll blog about it soon hopefully.  You can check out all the new features and fixed issues in the functional specification.
Posted by david ( Apr 08 2008, 11:54:58 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0] | |

Wednesday March 26, 2008

NetBeans 6 Local History

As I was preparing to deliver a session on "New & Cool" for NetBeans 6, I realized I didn't really understand the benefits of a new feature called "Local History" so I did some investigation.  What is the real value of Local History over undo/redo?  Yes the visual differences window show below is nice.  But was is the real advantage?




If you delete a chunk of code, you can restore it by reverting in local history.  I can easily do that with the undo.  I tested saving, deleting code, saving, then adding code and saving.  I expected local history to allow me to selectively undo the deleting code action while keeping my adding code action.  No dice.  Going back to a point in time adds back the deleted code but removes the added code.  

Answer: 

Local History is for entire file snapshots in time.  Think of it as a local SCM.  You can revert to a snapshot of a file at a certain time.  When is this useful?  Say you are coding away when you suddenly realize that you've followed an incorrect line of thinking.  You'd like to go back to where you were two days prior.  Well Undo is not going to get you there.  Local History saves the day!  Another Huge advantage of Local History is the "Revert Deleted".  Let's say you are doing some refactoring and you move major pieces of code out of a class and decide you can altogether delete the class from the project.  Then you realized that you forgot to move some critical code before deleting.  You can use Local History->Revert Deleted to restore every file you deleted in the project.  Again Local History has saved your bacon.

You can configure the number of days Local History holds on to versions of your files in the "Options-> Miscellaneous-> Versioning-> Local History" option.

Posted by david ( Mar 26 2008, 03:24:03 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0] | |

Wednesday February 06, 2008

Sun's Giving Away US$1 million to NetBeans Open Source Developers

Putting in lots of hours doing open source development and not getting paid for it?  Well Sun is putting it's money where it's heart is, open source.   Sun is giving US$1 million way to open source developers in the form of the NetBeans Innovators Grants.  Get paid for all the extra hours and hard work you put into open source.  At the same time, contribute to a hot open source community, NetBeans.  Don't sit around and think about it too long.  You only have until March 3 to enter a submission.   Then you have to August 4, 2008 to complete the project.

Posted by david ( Feb 06 2008, 09:21:54 AM MST ) Permalink Comments [0] | |

Friday November 30, 2007

NetBeans Visual Web - JSF, "Pretty" URLs and Multiple Instances of the Same Page

Since I introduced "Pretty URLs" in the NetBeans Plugin Portal, there have been some strange things happening like issues 119249, 122600, and 122340.  Once again I've been schooled on the JSF life cycle.  So here's what's happening.

Problem

When a button or link is clicked on a page and an action is associated on the pages backing bean, a post back occurs.  For the purposes of this discussion, a post back basically means a request is sent from the displayed web page to the server, the page backing bean action method is executed, a null is returned from the method telling the JSF framework not to navigate anywhere, and the page is redisplayed using the JSF Standard Processing Lifecycle.  If you look at the how I used the JSF life cycle in my earlier blog titled, "NetBeans Visual Web Pack - Real World Apps Tip #4 - "Pretty" URLs", I took advantage of the Visual Web application model "init" method.  In the details of implementing "Pretty" URLs, the key piece of information for rebuilding the state of the page in the "init" would logically be put on the SessionBean.  For example, for the Plugin Detail page I need the "currentPlugin".  So when I navigate to the Plugin Detail page I set the "currentPlugin" attribute on the SessionBean and use that for all the details.  So now what happens when someone right-clicks on my "Pretty" URL and chooses to open a different Plugin in another tab?  The Plugin Portal stores the new Plugin as the "currentPlugin" on the SessionBean.  Now on the first plugin, I do some action like click the download button.  Now to the important part!  Remember that a PageBean gets instantiated EVERY time a page is displayed.  This means the PageBean for the first Plugin is instantiated and gets the "currentPlugin" from the SessionBean.  Things are now bad because the second Plugin in the other tab set "currentPlugin".  So you have results like described in the issues above.

Solution

The solution for this seemed easy at first, save each page instance state per Plugin.  This turned out to be quite difficult to implement.  Again I realized that the biggest difficulty when using JSF is understanding the Standard Processing Lifecycle.  I somehow needed to save off state from a page with uniqueness and pull that state back.  For example, if a detail page was showing for a particular Plugin and the user opens another instance of the page with a different plugin, we need to have each page somehow maintain which plugin is which for a post back.  Remember we can't use the SessionBean for "currentPlugin" because each instance of the page will overwrite this attribute.  We can't use cookies because these are browser instance wide and not page specific.  The black magic is based on a nice class in the JSF framework called "UIViewRoot".  The "UIViewRoot" is the root of the component tree for all the components on the page.  And here's the best part, "UIViewRoot" is saved across post back calls.  This means on a post back, you can expect values set in components to be there when the page is rerendered.  This implementation does things like keeping form values across post backs to keep users form committing suicide after they've filled out a form for 3 hours only to hit the "submit" button and find out they missed a required field and now all the fields are blank.  The Visual Web application model has the "init" method that happens during the "Restore View" phase.


and expect to get the value you stuffed in there before a button was clicked.  So the trick is to pull the value out of the "UIViewRoot".  Here's the code that shows how I did this on the Plugin Detail page.

        /**
         * Process a GET type request.
         */

        HttpServletRequest request = (HttpServletRequest)FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getRequest();
        String [] pluginids = request.getParameterValues("pluginid");

        if(null != pluginids && pluginids.length == 1) {
          try {
            Long pluginid = new Long(Long.parseLong(pluginids[0]));
            currentPlugin = getApplicationBean1().getPluginSystem().getPlugin(pluginid);
            if(null != currentPlugin) {
              getSessionBean1().setCurrentPlugin(currentPlugin);
              getRequestBean1().setCurrentPlugin(currentPlugin);
              this.getTxtPluginID().setText(currentPlugin.getPluginid());
            }

          } catch(NumberFormatException nfe) {}

        } else {

          if(null == this.getCurrentPlugin()) {
           /**
            * Process a post back.
            */

           FacesContext fc = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
           UIViewRoot viewRoot = fc.getViewRoot();
           if(null != viewRoot) {
             StaticText pluginid_text =  
              (StaticText) viewRoot.findComponent("form1:center_container:page_border:fixed_contentarea:fixed_contextbox:topPanel:txtPluginID");
             if(null != pluginid_text) {
               Long pluginid = (Long)pluginid_text.getText();
               if(null != pluginid) {
                 currentPlugin = getApplicationBean1().getPluginSystem().getPlugin(pluginid);
               }

             }

           }

          }

        }

So you can see that for a "GET" style call with the "Pretty" URL we do what did before except we stuff the part of the state we want for the post back into a "Static Text" component.  In the case of the post back, we get a hidden field from the "UIViewRoot" and get its value to use.  So the one last piece is to create a "Static Text" component somewhere on the page and make it invisible.  As you can see from the code you have to fully qualify the name of the "Static Text" component.  In my case it's "txtPluginID".


Well I'm hoping another brick doesn't fall out the other side again.  If anyone has a better way to pull this off, please, please post a comment.


Posted by david ( Nov 30 2007, 12:53:36 AM MST ) Permalink Comments [0] | |

Thursday November 01, 2007

Mac OS X Leopard Black Screen of Death

What's this?  The Mac OS X Black Screen of Death?  I unplugged my USB 2.0 external drive and got this on the screen.  For the last year using Tiger I never saw this screen.


Posted by david ( Nov 01 2007, 02:54:23 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [1] | |

Saturday October 27, 2007

No Java 6 on Mac OS X Leopard

This picture says it all!




If you're thinking about upgrading to Leopard and you do Java development on your Mac (at least try to), don't bother.  I searched for hours trying to find Java 6 on Leopard and it just isn't there.  I did install some documentation pack but I can't even find it after I installed.  Honestly, I only bought the Leopard upgrade for Java 6.  There's really nothing else that is noticably worth it so far.  My fan control stopped working.  I have about a 1 year old Macbook Pro "17 with the core duo.  So now I have a hot Mac again.  Things actually seem more sluggish than before.  I already had to restart Finder which I NEVER had to do on Tiger.  All in all, as a Java developer, I might have to move off the Mac OS X platform.  This hardware is just too expensive to boot into some inferior OS like Windows.
Posted by david ( Oct 27 2007, 07:44:28 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [11] | |

Tuesday October 16, 2007

NetBeans 6.0: Ask The Experts on SDN October 22, 2007

Remember that burning question you had about NetBeans 6.0?  Well now is your chance to get that question answered.  I will be involved in a Sun Developers Network "Ask the Experts" starting October 22, 2007.   Brian Leonard, a fellow NetBeans Evangelist, as well as Judith Lilienfeld, my manager and Director of Tools Evangelism at Sun will also be on the panel.

Posted by david ( Oct 16 2007, 01:18:01 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0] | |

Saturday October 13, 2007

NetBeans 6.0: Making Me a KeyBoard Junkie

I was recently at a conference giving a demo for the new NetBeans 6.0 editor features.  In preparing for the demo and actually doing it,  I realized that reducing keystrokes is huge for developers.  I've been so accustomed to broken IDEs where I had to cursor and mouse around that I didn't realize how much NetBeans 6.0 editing has improved until I was in the middle of this demo.  I actually got a rush hitting the "Enter" key and seeing smart code completion save me lots of keystrokes.  I'm becoming a keyboard junkie (no sneering from the emacs crowd) so now I'm looking for more keystroke saving key bindings.  A great resource to get started on Java editor enhancments in NetBeans 6.0 is the Java Editor User's Guide on the NetBeans public Wiki.  Two keystroke and mouse saving features I recently found useful are AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) selection and Next/Previous Tab.

The AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) keymap is listed in the "Tools->Options" (Preferences on Mac OS X) under the "Keymap" heading.  The actual setting is "Other->Select Next Element/Select Previous Element".  This lets you select things like a keyword, a line, and a block of code.  The default key mapping is "Alt-Shift-PERIOD" (Ctrl-Shift-PERIOD on Mac OS X) to select more and "Alt-Shift-COMMA" (Ctrl-Shift-COMMA on Mac OS X) to select less.

I found out about Next/Previous Tab in Gregg Sporar's blog.  But I couldn't get this to work so I did some investigation.  On Mac OS X the default key binding to do a Next Tab is "Meta-PAGE_DOWN".  To get this to work you need to press "Meta-Fn-PAGE".  Pressing three keys at once really doesn't save me much so I remapped this to "Meta-DOWN" and "Meta-UP".  Note that you will have to "Remove" these key mappings from the "Other->Insertion Point to End of Document" and "Other->Insertion Point to Beginning of Document".



Posted by david ( Oct 13 2007, 11:55:31 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [3] | |

Monday October 01, 2007

Code to Make a Tag Cloud in Wicket

 
       Form form = new Form("form");
        add(form);

        final TextField field = new TextField("field", new Model(""));
        form.add(field);

        final Label label = new Label("selectedValue", new Model(""));
        label.setOutputMarkupId(true);
        form.add(label);

        CategoryCount[] counts = getPluginSystem().getCategoryCounts();
        List countsList = Arrays.asList(counts);

        final DataView repeater = new DataView("cloud", new ListDataProvider(countsList)) {

            protected void populateItem(final Item item) {

                MyLink link = new MyLink("link");

                item.add(link);


                String categoryName = ((CategoryCount) item.getModelObject()).getCategoryName();

                String categoryStart = getCurrentPrefix();
                if (null == categoryName) {
                    link.setVisible(false);
                    return;
                }
                /**
                 * If the category doesn't begin with the typed in prefix, don't add it to the cloud.
                 */
                if (null != categoryStart && null != categoryName) {
                    if (!categoryName.toUpperCase().startsWith(categoryStart.toUpperCase())) {
                        link.setVisible(false);
                        return;
                    }
                }

                Label label = new Label("text", ((CategoryCount) item.getModelObject()).getCategoryName());
                Model model = new Model() {
                };
                AttributeModifier am = new AttributeModifier("style", new Model() {

                    @Override
                    public Object getObject() {
                        return getLinkStyle((CategoryCount) item.getModelObject());
                    }
                });
                label.add(am);

                link.add(label); //the Caption property ought to be picked up by reflection
                //or you could create a subclass of AbstractReadOnlyModel to
                //fetch it if reflection bothers you
            }
        };

        add(repeater);
        /**
         *  We need to set the output markup id so it can be used as an AJAX target
         */
        setOutputMarkupId(true);
        /**
         *  Now set up the AJAX handling
         */
        OnChangeAjaxBehavior onChangeAjaxBehavior = new OnChangeAjaxBehavior() {

            @Override
            protected void onUpdate(AjaxRequestTarget target) {
                setCurrentPrefix(field.getModelObjectAsString());
                target.addComponent(getCloudPanel());
            }
        };
        field.add(onChangeAjaxBehavior);

Posted by david ( Oct 01 2007, 07:20:19 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0] | |

Tuesday September 04, 2007

Tim's Hitting the U.S. in the NetBeans Mobile

My fellow NetBeans Evangelist, Tim Boudreau, told me he was moving from California to Massachusetts, and he had purchased a truck to make the trip. When I saw the truck I come up with this crazy idea to have Tim do some advertising for NetBeans and also let the world follow him by using a GPS device and a web site.  Well Tim went for the idea and my manager Judith Lilienfeld supported the idea so Tim spent many hours getting the truck ready for action.  Here's a picture of the truck just to get you interested.


Posted by david ( Sep 04 2007, 11:44:13 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0] | |

Tuesday August 07, 2007

NetBeans Visual Web Pack - Real World Apps Tip #4 - "Pretty" URLs

Problem

One issue that's been plaguing the NetBeans Plugin Portal from the beginning is the lack of direct URLs to portions of the web application.  As many of you know, JSF page navigation creates some pretty horrendous URLs.  Besides being "Ugly", as one user put it, you can't use the URLs to reference pages in the web application.  Without going into the design considerations for JSF, I will mention that one of the main issues is state.  Yes I know.  In any web application development managing state is always an issue.  If you read my JavaOne 2007 BOF slides, you will see that I had somewhat of a solution on slides 54-55 by providing a "Permanent Link" then dispatching through my main page.  This worked but when you ended up on the page, the URL was still ugly.  I've Googled many times on the subject but always seem to wind up in the same place with the solution.  Winston Prakash in the NetBeans visual web engineering group did a blog entry on another real world application built on Visual Web Pack.  A few weeks ago I was looking at what Joshua van Aalst had done with his web site.  Joshua had a goal of making much of the web site Search Engine Optimized (SEO) so he needed to replace the ugly URLs.  His technique included using a servlet filter and converters.  In looking at his solution and doing some testing, I realized that my original solution was very close with one critical mistake.  I was sending everything through the main page then doing a redirect to the PluginDetailPage after setting up state.  

Solution

The solution - change all the links in the web app to point to the real pages and set up the state in each page "init()" method.  The solution involves still using "GET" style URLs.  So the first step is to design the URL for each page that you will provide direct linking to.  The URL will need to contain adequate information for the given page to build the web application state on the fly.  For example, to provide direct linking to the category list page, I designed the following URL.

http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal/faces/CategoryPage.jsp?categoryname=Tools

As you can see, the URL has a parameter named  "categoryname" and a value of "Tools".  In the "init" method of the CategoryPage class,  I use the following code.

        /**
         * Process a GET type request.
         */
        HttpServletRequest request = (HttpServletRequest)FacesContext.getCurrentInstance().getExternalContext().getRequest();
        String [] categories = request.getParameterValues("categoryname");
        if(null != categories && categories.length == 1) {
            getSessionBean1().setCurrentCategoryName(categories[0]);
        }

The above code is what the Plugin Portal needs to set up state for the category list page.  That's all that's really needed.  The major refactoring I had to do was to change all the hyperlinks to be in this "Pretty" format.

Posted by david ( Aug 07 2007, 02:27:57 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0] | |

Tuesday July 10, 2007

NetBeans Plugin Portal Project Web Site

I've just finished putting together the NetBeans Plugin Portal project page on netbeans.org.  You can get there by going to http://pluginportal.netbeans.org.  This site will be the project for the current NetBeans Plugin Portal.  From this site you can navigate to the source code, join mailing lists, see latest design artifacts, etc.

I just published the functional specification for Phase III.  Please check it out and send your comments about the spec to the users@pluginportal.netbeans.org mailing list.

Posted by david ( Jul 10 2007, 11:34:30 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [1] | |

Wednesday June 27, 2007

NetBeans Plugin Portal Source Code Open Sourced

For those of you who haven't found the code yet, I thought I would officially announce that I've published the source code for the NetBeans Plugin Portal on netbeans.org.  The URL to browse the source is http://www.netbeans.org/source/browse/pluginportal/.  So now you can see all the good, the bad, and the ugly code that went into making the Plugin Portal.  I'll continue to blog in detail about the experience but if you can't wait and you need to see how something was done, please go look at the source code.  The code is under a CDDL license if you decide to use any of it wholesale.  If you see any blatant errors in the code or better ways of doing things, please open an Issue.

Posted by david ( Jun 27 2007, 01:26:18 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0] | |

Friday June 22, 2007

NetBeans Visual Web Pack - Real World Apps Tip #3 - Tag Clouds

Finally I've found the time to show you how to do tag clouds in NetBeans 5.5 with Visual Web Pack.  In my last blog, I showed you how to create dynamic Hyperlinks.  In the blog before that, I discussed how to do dynamic content.  Both of those topics provide necessary background information for creating a tag cloud.

First, let me provide a little background on how I tackled creating a tag cloud.  Since I really didn't know what a tag cloud was, I started with the Wikipedia's definition.  Next, since my task was not to be an expert on tag clouds but to implement one on the web site, I simply needed an algorithm to get me started.  I found an excellent white paper by Kevin Hoffman called, "In Search Of...The Perfect Tag Cloud".   Based on the Plugin Portal needs and Kevin's explanation, I decided to use the "Linear Distribution Algorithm".

Plugin Portal Details

The goal is to basically have a set of words that are displayed in different font sizes based on how many "things" there are for that word.  With the Plugin Portal, the words represent categories.  The bolder, bigger font category names are the ones with more entries in the category.  The sample project I'll include will include hard coded data but I thought I would take a moment to talk about the query behind the Plugin Portal that gave me the results I needed.  In the case of the Plugin Portal, I needed to define a type that contained a category name and a category count.  I created a class called "CategoryCount".  Here's the code including the query that creates the "CategoryCount" instances.

        String select = "select distinct o.categoryname, cc.cat_count from othercategoryimpl o," +
                " (select distinct categoryname,count(categoryname) as cat_count from othercategoryimpl cc group by categoryname) as cc" +
                " where o.categoryname=cc.categoryname order by o.categoryname";
        Query query = em.createNativeQuery(select);
        List resultList = query.getResultList();
        Iterator resultIterator = resultList.iterator();
        Vector currentResult = null;
        while(resultIterator.hasNext()) {
            currentResult = (Vector)resultIterator.next();
            String categoryName = (String)currentResult.get(0); //category name.
            Integer categoryCount = (Integer)currentResult.get(1); //count
            CategoryCount currentRecord = new CategoryCount(categoryName, categoryCount.intValue());
            newCache.add(currentRecord);
        }

You can see from this SQL query that I really have to do two passes of the data.  The "from" target:

(select distinct categoryname,count(categoryname) as cat_count from othercategoryimpl cc group by categoryname) as cc

gets the actual count for each category.  Believe me this query took a while to get right.  I don't claim to be a SQL expert so if someone knows of an easier method, please let me know.

Creating the "Comparator"

Part of the goal also is to have the words sorted alphabetically so I chose to use "Arrays.sort".  To use this method, we need to create a specialized "Comparator" that knows how to compare our "Count" type.  For my simplified example, I will be creating "CategoryCount" as the "Count" type.  Here's the code.

public class CategoryCount {
    
    /** Creates a new instance of CategoryCount */
    public CategoryCount() {
    }
    
    public CategoryCount(String inName, int inCount) {
        setName(inName);
        setCount(inCount);
    }

    /**
     * Holds value of property name.
     */
    private String name;

    /**
     * Getter for property name.
     * @return Value of property name.
     */
    public String getName() {
        return this.name;
    }

    /**
     * Setter for property name.
     * @param name New value of property name.
     */
    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    /**
     * Holds value of property count.
     */
    private int count;

    /**
     * Getter for property count.
     * @return Value of property count.
     */
    public int getCount() {
        return this.count;
    }

    /**
     * Setter for property count.
     * @param count New value of property count.
     */
    public void setCount(int count) {
        this.count = count;
    }
    
}

Also we need a Comparator to sort this type.  Here's the "CountComparator".

import java.util.Comparator;


public class CountComparator implements Comparator  {
    
    /** Creates a new instance of CountComparator */
    public CountComparator() {
    }
    /**
     * This method is used to compare o1 and o2.
     * @param o1 The first object to compare to o2
     * @param o2 The second object to compare to o1
     * @return a negative integer, zero, or a positive integer if o1
     * is less than, equal to, or greater than o2
     */
    public int compare(Object o1, Object o2) {
        
        String o1categoryname = ((CategoryCount)o1).getName();
        String o2categoryname = ((CategoryCount)o2).getName();
        return o1categoryname.compareToIgnoreCase(o2categoryname);
        
    }
}

The Linear Distribution Algorithm Details

The idea behind this algorithm is to figure out a range for a set of "Buckets" then distribute your items in the buckets according to where they fit into the range.  The first step is to decide on the number of buckets to use.  In a tag cloud you'll be deciding how many font size ranges you want.  For the Plugin Portal, we chose six buckets.  So to figure out the range, you need to take the max count of the items - the min count of the items and divide by the number of buckets.  This gives you the range to use for each bucket.  Here's the code I'll use in my sample to figure out the range.

    private long getCloudRange(int min, int max) {
        /**
         * For this tag cloud we will use the linear distribution algorithm with six different "buckets".
         * The algorithm is:
         *  category weight = max number/category - min number/category
         *  range = category weight/number of buckets (6).
         *
         */
        long weight = 0;
        long range = 0;
        
        weight = max - min;
        if(weight < 6) {
            /**
             * We don't have a very big range of numbers in categories so we need to increase the
             * weight so the range will be bigger.
             */
            range = 1;
        } else {
            range = weight/6;
        }
        
        
        return range;
    }

The other key piece of the implementation is to assign a font based on which bucket the item fits into.  Here's my sample method to do that.

    private String getFont(CategoryCount inCount,long bucketRange) {
        String fontsize1="font-size: 10px; font-weight: normal;";
        String fontsize2="font-size: 11px; font-weight: normal;";
        String fontsize3="font-size: 12px; font-weight: normal;";
        String fontsize4="font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal;";
        String fontsize5="font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal;";
        String fontsize6="font-size: 15px; font-weight: normal;";
        
        /**
         * Determine which of the buckets the count falls into.
         */
        if(inCount.getCount() >= 0 && inCount.getCount() <= bucketRange) {
            return fontsize1;
        } else if(inCount.getCount() >= (bucketRange*1) +1 && inCount.getCount() <= (bucketRange*1)+bucketRange) {
            return fontsize2;
        } else if(inCount.getCount() >= (bucketRange*2) +1 && inCount.getCount() <= (bucketRange*2)+bucketRange) {
            return fontsize3;
        } else if(inCount.getCount() >= (bucketRange*3) +1 && inCount.getCount() <= (bucketRange*3)+bucketRange) {
            return fontsize4;
        } else if(inCount.getCount() >= (bucketRange*4) +1 && inCount.getCount() <= (bucketRange*4)+bucketRange) {
            return fontsize5;
        } else {
            return fontsize6;
        }
    }

Leveraging our dynamic Hyperlink experience, we will need a block of code like this create the actual Tag Cloud.

        /**
         * Sort the CategoryCounts
         */
        Arrays.sort(counts,new CountComparator());
        
        /**
         * Get the range to use for the tag cloud.
         */
        long range = getCloudRange(minCategory,maxCategory);
        
        /**
         * Create all the hyperlinks and add them to the dynamic panel.
         */
        ArrayList<Hyperlink> hyperlinks = new ArrayList();
        Hyperlink dynamicHyperlink = null;
        for(int ii=0; null != counts && ii < counts.length; ii++) {
            dynamicHyperlink = new Hyperlink();
            dynamicHyperlink.setText(counts[ii].getName());
            dynamicHyperlink.setActionListenerExpression(listenerMethod);
            dynamicHyperlink.setActionExpression(actionMethod);
            /**
             * Get the font for this link which will be calculated based on the 
             * count and where it falls into a range for each bucket.
             */
            String font = getFont(counts[ii],range);
            dynamicHyperlink.setStyle(font);
            dynamicPanel.getChildren().add(dynamicHyperlink);
            
        }

The Finished Product

Running my sample project, you can see that we get a small cloud.