Friday September 21, 2007
Friday September 21, 2007
Visual Database Explorer
I went through Toni Epple's Visual Database Explorer Tutorial for the first time. I built the whole module, on a NetBeans IDE 6.0 development build from yesterday. Everything worked pretty much as described in Toni's tutorial, except that the Visual Library API is now part of the NetBeans Platform, so that you don't need to take any special steps to include it in the module. No need to download anything from the Visual Library source ZIP, except that the images are useful. The result is that you can choose a menu item, after selecting a connection in the Services node, and then the database structure is visually reflected in a new window:
I'd like to turn it into one of the official NetBeans tutorials. But, I guess, the Database Explorer API would need to be stabilized first, which I don't think it is currently. I needed to set an implementation dependency on it. Also, maybe the final plugin could be included in the Plugin Portal, because clearly this is a very useful piece of functionality that adds real value to the user's database activities when working with the IDE.
In other news. Tried it successfully in 6.0 Beta 1 and got permission from Toni to put it in the Plugin Portal, as a sample. Go here to get it. (By the way, I updated yesterday's Feature Viewer, to 1.5, and now there isn't a problem with dependencies anymore, although the Print Preview is disabled now.)
Sep 21 2007, 06:58:24 AM PDT Permalink
15 Comments