New components in woodstock.
The woodstock component set has been in the process of introducing new components into the palette. The components that have been introduced of late are:
- Bubble component - The bubble component shows up a "popup div" on a web page. This is usually invoked on a "onmouseover" event of a component when you want to show more information about the component. You can customize the kind of content that is put inside the bubble such as images, text or hyperlinks. Animesh has a good blog entry which explains more on it.
- Accordion - Accordion is a very cool component which you can use for navigation and also to display data. The contents of accordion can also be refreshed asynchronously.I have seen accordions in one of gnome's window system. Web based accordion though seems much cooler.
- Menu - There really shouldnt be much to explain about this component. You would have probably used it everyday in a window based system. If not, just press shift+F10 or right click anywhere in your computer. 
Here is how the woodstock menu looks like.
You can see these components in action at:
http://webdev2.sun.com/example/faces/index.jsp
These components are not in the default list of components that show up in netbeans 6.0 VWP palette.
However, you can either
a) Go to the JSP view of the page you are creating and write the tags yourself and the beans too.
b) Follow the instructions in
http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javatools/InstallingWoodstockComponentsInNetBeans
(Note: As of writing this blog, only bubble component has designtime enabled. Menu and accordion are still work in progress)
Happy exploring!
