Petr Dvorak: Petr Dvorak's Weblog

Me and my friend were walking in the streets of Luxor, desperately looking for something to eat in an early night. In spite of being the center of an Egyptian tourism, it is quite hard to find a clean restaurant in the city.

Suddenly, I glimpsed a seafood restaurant and - well - the picture on its board was at least quite familiar to me...

I spent some time staring at the board, trying to make sure I am not mistaken... Well, in the end, we didn't eat there but still the restaurant left a great impression...

This just makes me wonder - do local Mexican restaurants cook from NetBeans?

Userdir is a directory where NetBeans RCP applications store settings and cache. Sometimes it can be helpful to be able to get the directory from the NetBeans RCP application itself. Most of the users initially go with something like:

String user_dir = System.getProperty("user.dir");

... and then they realize this returns a different folder from what they need. Instead, they are looking for this:

String user_dir = System.getProperty("netbeans.user");

The university/student projects have their own specifics. One of the most visible one is that the innovation and enthusiasm is often combined with rather weak software engineering and poor execution. I know it from my own experience. When I and my team of three students started our software project at the MatFyz (Charles University in Prague), we had to deal with a lot of issues on our own.

For example, we were looking for the right development tools and for the infrastructure for our project... As we didn't have much practical experience with this, we ended up with our own instance of wiki (MediaWiKi on a freehosting), we used our own issue tracker (really - I am serious, we wrote our own PHP application just for the purpose - yeah, we were... young...), we placed our code in the Mercurial repository located on our faculty server and we used Google Groups as an alternative to the mailing lists.

...

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"Scanning in progress..." - I believe that everyone have met the issue. You open some larger project and you can not use the NetBeans IDE for a few minutes until the sources are "scanned", whatever it means...[Read More]

... or rather "Finally, a font size can be configured for Output view"?

Today, I was sitting in my office with Tomas Holy, a dev guy who was responsible for the Output view (the view where build output is written, for example). We were chatting for a while as we needed to relax a bit after the hard labor we do.

I suddenly recalled a very commonly heard RFE's:

"Thomas, you know what you should implement? Settings for the font size in the Output view..."

Tomas's reply was plain as usual - with his traditionally bored voice he said:

"Yeah, it is already there..."

He was right, it really showed up in NetBeans 6.7... Those are great news for many people (especially for teachers/professors who use NB IDE at their lessons).

So currently, you can right-click the output window a do quite a lot of cool stuff, such as:

• Resize the font (Ctrl+MouseWheel works as well)
• Change a font ("wrapping mode" must be disabled)
• Set a filter for the output lines (so that only lines matching a regexp can be shown, for example)

Furthermore, Tomas told me he did some rather major enhancements regarding the search functionality (in the Output window), therefore the search should be much faster and should be more memory efficient. I bet everyone has noticed better coloring of the text output...

I hope you will be happy of this enhancement as much as I am!

Are you a Java developer and did you ever need to build your sources automatically? In this case, you must have already heard about Hudson... If you have used this tool, you must also know how great it is... But there is one more cool thing now (get ready to get excited). We have integrated Hudson in the NetBeans IDE 6.7.[Read More]

Friends of mine who tried to play around with the NetBeans platform usually didn't know how to correctly create a custom dialog. They tend to reason about this task in the basic "swingy" way: create a new JOptionPane, set it visible when needed and hide it when not needed anymore... But the NetBeans platform has much better and more structured way of displaying a dialog.[Read More]

This blog post describes how to clone and build NetBeans from the Hg repository. It also contains some notes that I received from my friends who followed my original instructions.[Read More]