Monday November 29, 2004

I wrote the November newsletter editorial for the Creator site; it covers using CSS styles and components to make better looking web applications. We're going to incorporate more of this in sample applications too.

Tuesday November 23, 2004

If you're writing a JSF component, there are a couple of things you can do to make the component behave more nicely at design time. (Well, there are actually a lot of things you can be doing, and we'll document these shortly, such that your components can have the same rich designtime behavior in Creator that for example the standard JSF data table has.)

Anyway, some of these techniques are general beyond the Creator JSF designtime library:

First, in your renderer, which generates HTML from the JSF component, you can check the Beans.isDesignTime() property. If set, the component is being rendered during design time preview of the component, so you can change what you render accordingly. For example, if you have a "container" component, and it has zero children, at runtime you probably want your container to render nothing, but at design time you should render something to show the user your component; for example, you can set up a particular size for your component or render some explanatory text within the container. This example for simplicity just sets the background color to red:

   if (Beans.isDesignTime() && component.getChildCount() == 0) {
        writer.writeAttribute("bgcolor", "red", null); // Ugly example
   } else {
        ...

Another thing you can do is include images from your component library at designtime -- these don't need to be included in the user's project since they are just shown at design time and are therefore available to the IDE:

   if (Beans.isDesignTime() && component.getChildCount() == 0) {
        // Show special design time icon
        writer.startElement("img", component);
        URL url = MyClass.class.getResource("myicon.png");
        writer.writeURIAttribute("src", url, null);
        ...

Finally, I've already mentioned how you might want to set the default property for your component to improve the design time handling of this component.

Sunday November 21, 2004

I just got back from a really nice week in Prague. I got to see some demos of upcoming NetBeans features. Unbelievably cool. The form editor has a new design mode which is just going to, well, kick ass. No more gridbag, dude. The new mobile stuff is also fantastic. NetBeans is really getting fabulous.

What's the deal with airports and power sockets? I really wanted to connect my laptop while waiting for my next flight (and the battery was flat) yet I couldn't find a place to plug in anywhere in Frankfurt airport. I had the same experience last year at Heathrow. That time I finally found one in the middle of nowhere, but as soon as I had gotten comfortable security came by and told me to leave because there's some kind of "danger" with having people connect their own hardware to the airport power net. In Frankfurt I walked around for 45 minutes before locating a place to plug in -- at the airport McDonalds. So I was lovin' it...

Friday November 12, 2004

I recently mentioned the component default properties being shown inline in the application outline, as of Creator patch 3. Turns out there's a performance issue related to this for components whose default property is a value bound expression -- such as an output text in a data-bound data table for example. If you're noticing sluggish performance (this will most likely be the case if you're using a database that is not running locally) try hiding the application outline.

I've just fixed this, so look for the fix in the next patch if this affects you.

It's been quite a week. We had a deadline for an internal milestone this week, so we've been up coding late every night - I even pulled an all-nighter Wednesday. Working hard to improve Creator, people :-) The next version will have some important fixes in it. Yes, I have to be vague or I will be arrested by the You Can't Promise Anything Police...

Today my youngest son had a CAT scan in preparation for surgery in the next month; the picture on the right is from his other scan.

Next week I'm heading out to Prague for some interesting engineering discussions. I've been there before -- it's a beautiful city full of nice people and good food, so I'm really looking forward to it.

Wednesday November 10, 2004

I've written an article for the developers.sun.com Creator site which describes how a Creator application is put together, from the JSPX markup and stylesheets to the page beans and navigation files. You can read Anatomy of a Java Studio Creator Application here, but be sure to check out the other resources added this month as well, around the theme of JSF components.

(2004-11-10 14:54:40.0) Permalink

Sunday November 07, 2004

The source code for J2SE 5.0 has been made available. Slashdot covered the event, and one of the posts showed that the community has already poured over the source code in an attempt to clean up its quality...

I immediately started a search command on the current Creator source to see if we have any juicy comments I can share with you.... But we don't. I tried successively less "offensive" words, and the only hits I got were for "stupid" and "lame"...

xxx/Utilities.java:     *  is really lame. The problem is that at the top level, I need
xxx/DnDSupport.java:   // insertTab is too stupid to notice that inserting a tab at the

This brought back some good (?) memories though. I used to work on Sun WorkShop, the C/C++ IDE for Solaris from Sun, and one of the really nice things about the IDE was that it integrated (not emulated) the XEmacs and vi editors. So we shipped XEmacs with the product. Well, XEmacs came with a bunch of supporting packages, such as Zippy -- which had a large database of insults copackaged with it, ready to be automatically attached as e-mail signatures etc. People actually complained about this, so we removed some of these, and we added a script to the emacs source tree integration process which scanned for a list of "offensive words" and yanked elisp packages containing them!

Thursday November 04, 2004

Here's another feature in patch 3: the application outline shows the most important property in a component. For example, if you have four buttons in the outline, how do you know which one is which? Most likely the buttons will have different labels, and as you can see from the screenshot, the button labels now appear next to the instance names.

This relies on the default property of a component. As you can see, the default property for a button is its label (value) property. For images, it's the (base) filename of the image. For a hyperlink, it's the url, and for a text component it's the actual text shown.

Note that you can quickly edit these properties. Click on a component, such as a button. Now just start typing. Keyboard focus will transfer to the property sheet, scroll to the default property, and you have started editing it.

For html tags there's no instance name (since the html markup does not appear in the page beans), but if tag has an id or name attribute, those are shown next to the tag name.

Wednesday November 03, 2004

Red States For Sale. Not really used. Want to Must sell immediately. Any bid entertained.

Tuesday November 02, 2004

I've got a couple of external links to share. First, App Dev Trends have reviewed Creator - 4/5 stars. Second, here's an interview with Tim Boudreau who's done some really great work on NetBeans, including the Navigator module I can't live without; I hope it's made part of the standard distribution soon. I've met Tim several times, last time at JavaOne this summer at the Creator launch party, and he's a really nice guy. The interview mentions some future trends for NetBeans which I can't wait to use.

I've been doing a lot of debugging lately (which I use NetBeans 3.6 for), but I decided to take 4.0 beta2 for a test spin. Wow. In addition to improvements for various usability issues I had brought up in the past, there are lots of other improvements.

I really like the new project system. I'm using my own ant files - the same ones used by release engineering for Creator - and I can run, debug, and test the project. I've also got Fix & Continue working now. There's a new special target in my ant file such that when ant is run inside the IDE, the ant target causes the freshly built class files to be hotswapped into the running target VM. Unlike the old fix & continue action, where I'd have to wait about ten seconds, fix and continue now takes about two seconds.

The new code editor stuff seems to work well too -- I've used rename refactoring, find usages, and fix imports.

I noticed some sluggishness in one area of my code, so I think I'll have to check out their new Performance Profiler as well!

I'm not just happy with these NetBeans changes because they make me more productive. Creator is built on top of NetBeans and will take advantage of many of these features when we upgrade to the 4.0 platform.

Happy U.S. election day folks, now do your duty and go and vote! It's not like it's hard to choose this time.