Monday May 26, 2008
Monday May 26, 2008
Advanced Java Swing Calendar: Perfect for NetBeans Users!
Many/most(?) applications need a calendar in one form or another. MiG Calendar, by Swedish fighter pilot / Swing developer Mikael Grev, is an out-of-the-box calendar component for Java Swing applications. But not for free. However, it seems cool enough (and well documented enough) to make it a very worthwhile choice.
On top of that, it seems particularly well suited for NetBeans users. The evaluation page shows the following:
So I installed that NetBeans plugin in NetBeans IDE 6.1 and got a whole bunch of new components in the palette:
Plus, when I downloaded the evaluation pack (i.e., not the plugin, but one of the other items in the first screenshot above), I found a bunch of NetBeans projects in the download:
Especially the "CategoriesDemo" is great:
And porting it to the NetBeans Platform was a purely point-and-click activity:
I reckon that, especially if you're a NetBeans Platform developer, i.e., especially if you're working on a LARGE application, the advanced functionality provided by the Mig Calendar component seems a perfect fit. Do you really want to mess around creating your own calendar? Or do you want to take something off the shelf that is very configurable (and well documented with great samples) and simply integrate it into your application?
By the way, this particular information would have been available to far more people and a lot sooner if it had been made available via the Plugin Portal. In other words, you don't need to make an actual plugin available there if you don't want to do that—you can simply create an entry that points to a page where your plugin is found, even if the functionality isn't free and even if it is for evaluation purposes only.
PS: Never mind. Here it is:
http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPortal/faces/PluginDetailPage.jsp?pluginid=4588
May 26 2008, 10:23:00 AM PDT Permalink
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