Component Library Information Update
Monday Mar 12, 2007
A developer sent me some email recently asking about how to develop and package custom components for IDEs like NetBeans 5.5 Visual Web Pack (VWP). So I updated some information such as the main component library page that I maintain. However, what this developer wanted was information on writing the components themselves. This is a more difficult task and so there is a separate page I maintain on that topic. Unfortunately, it is not current. But now that VWP has been open sourced, current development is happening on the NetBeans nbusers and nbdev mailing lists. I know there are other people working on this area so I would like to encourage developers to post their questions there, but feel free to contact me if you need specific information from me.
Many months (or was it a year!) ago, I wrote a prototype popup calendar component, that may be of use as a sample. It has been incorporated into the java.net blueprints project. Look under the "bpcatalog/ui" subtree for runtime and design-time sources in the "com.sun.j2ee.blueprints.ui.popupcalendar" package. For example, there is a "PopupCalendarComponent" class and a "PopupCalendarComponentBeanInfo" class. This prototype component uses hand-coded files and illustrates the artifacts that are needed to create the additional meta-data needed for a component. Much of the hand coding is boiler-plate code, however, and keeping the code in sync can be error prone. So another approach is to use a code generator. The newly open sourced Project Woodstock components take this approach. It uses Java 5 Annotations and an annotation processor to generate boiler-plate code.
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