Roumen's Weblog

Po	Út	St	Čt	Pá	So	Ne
« červenec 2009
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Today

Navigation

Speaker Profile
Roumen's Weblog
Login
Sun Bloggers
Technorati Profile

Am I popular?

Today's Page Hits: 1165

Contacts

Name: Roman Strobl
E-mail: roman dot strobl
at sun dot com

NetBeans

Java Sites

Javalobby
The Server Side
Java Tips
Java Blogs
java.net
java.sun.com
java.cz

Blogs

License info

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Map of visits

« Javaposse @ NetBeans... | Main | Friday Fun Stuff »

Pátek květen 18, 2007

New Expert Preso: NetBeans Visual Library

I recorded a new 18-minute flash presentation, it is available on the homepage of javalobby.org. It focuses on visual library, which is an open source visualization library used in NetBeans Mobility Pack and some other parts of the IDE as well (JSF flow design in NetBeans 6, CASA designer, etc.).

The cool thing about visual library is that it handles all the low-level visualization for you, so you can declare how your scene and widgets should look like and how they should behave. You don't have to be busy with redrawing the scene, handling hover actions, drawing connections, handling movement, zoom, etc. The library is Swing-based, the APIs are simple and you can take advantage of visual library even if you don't use NetBeans platform - it is also available as a regular library for any Swing application.

In my demos I show some of the features of visual library and I also build a fully-featured Mind Mapper application in approx. 10 minutes. It's a fast-paced demo but I provide the sources as well so you can open the application in NetBeans 6.0 M9 and experiment with visual library if you want to dive into the code.

Without any further ado, you can watch the preso here:

Enjoy!

Comments:

Are there any plans to support SVG icons? It seems like its a planned feature, but its unclear if it will be implemented till NB6.

Posted by Bernhard Neuhauser on květen 18, 2007 at 10:02 dop. CEST #

I'll ask David Kaspar (the main developer of Visual Library). He's on vacation now, so it may take a while to get the answer.

Posted by Roumen on květen 18, 2007 at 10:24 dop. CEST #

YESSSSSSSSSSS A new Demo! really great ;) Talk to you soon ;)

Posted by Laurent M on květen 19, 2007 at 04:12 dop. CEST #

SVG icons would be great, but what I'm wondering is more general support for vector graphic primitives. The library seems to me more like a way to draw nodes and connect them which is great, but what would be even nicer is a general "scene graph" for 2D graphics. Imagine using an SVG driven (or programmatic) vector rendering of a map in the background. You could then use the visual library to draw javafx scripts that describe a scene.

Posted by Augusto on květen 19, 2007 at 04:49 dop. CEST #

Excellent

Posted by Ramón on květen 19, 2007 at 09:25 dop. CEST #

SVG support is planned for NB 6.0. The only issue is which an SVG rendering framework should be used. Since Perseus library is bundled with NetBeans IDE, it may be used for it. The only problem is that by Perseus library would have to be moved to the NetBeans Platform ... Available features could be SVGBorder (could be also used for rendering background) and SVGWidget (for rendering SVG image) and SVGAnchor (which resolved an anchor as a location of SVG element found by its name). I have enetered an issue #104384, so you can track the progress.

Posted by David Kaspar on květen 21, 2007 at 08:18 dop. CEST #

The reason why the library does not contain drawing primitives is:

there are plenty of them and there will be always one more missing
usually they are not usable as they are - you have to compose them together to get nice visualization
it would probably lead to decrease of the library performance since developers would be "kindly-pushed" to use PrimitivesWidgets instead of creating they own Widget with a custom "paint" method which is always a way faster.

Anyway it is possible to implement it at any time. If you have an idea or implementation let us know on the mailing list.

Posted by David Kaspar on květen 21, 2007 at 08:20 dop. CEST #

Thanks David!

Posted by Roumen on květen 21, 2007 at 10:23 dop. CEST #

Would it be possible to get this tutorial in PDF (or any readable) form ? Thanks

Posted by Martin Miller on květen 21, 2007 at 09:15 odp. CEST #

Similar tutorial is available on netbeans.org, not exactly the same but similar. Hope that helps.

Posted by Roumen on květen 21, 2007 at 09:19 odp. CEST #