Insert Witty Irony Here

Thursday May 24, 2007

Which mini doesn't belong on the list

• Apple's Mac Mini
• Mini Cooper
• miniskirt
• Minnie Mouse

GlassFish Integration Features: NB 6.0

I noticed that planetnetbeans.org is pointing to this very idle feed for my blog, so many of my recent entries are not getting picked up. I figured I would provide an "index" entry here, until the planet folks get this worked out....

I recently started a new series of entries. You can follow this link to a search for all of my entries about new GlassFish integration features for NetBeans 6.0.

I also have some information about an experiment I am doing with web and enterprise projects related to keybindings. I looked at web application development in this first entry. I will post more results about enterprise project development sometime next week.

Insert a link to the news about the NetBeans 5.5.1 release here.

If you want to get the live feed of my NetBeans related entries, you will probably want to subscribe to: http://blogs.sun.com/vkraemer/feed/entries/rss?cat=%2FNetBeans
(2007-05-24 09:17:34.0) Permalink

Wednesday May 23, 2007

Finger Macros in Java EE Development (part 1)

As folks can probably tell, my main responsibility around here is to help maintain and extend the integration modules for GlassFish and Sun's application server offerings. I am also very interested in the development experience for Java EE that NetBeans provides.

I recently started looking at how to structure a couple simple elements of IDE to reduce the number of keystrokes that I use when working on a web or enterprise project. My goal is to find the edge cases and propose some enhancements.

The two elements of the IDE are the editor and the 'Main Project'. The editor is obvious, since almost every change that you want to test will be made there. The 'Main Project' is special, since a number of actions and keybindings trigger actions associated with this project, instead of the project which "owns" the code that you have focused in the editor.

I started off looking at a various scenarios to see what the current situation is. Since I was writing it down, I figured I might as well share what I found.

In the first set of experiments I have two projects open. I have a web app as the Main Project and an additional class library project that the web app depends on.

File in the Editor	From Main Project	Action (Keybinding)	Result
A jsp file	yes	Save (Command-S)	File saved to source and deployment directory. The user can switch applications to the browser (Command-Tab), possibly need to switch application windows (Command-`) and finally reload the page (Command-R) to see their updated content.
a jsp file	yes	Run File (Shift-F6)	The jsp file is saved (if it was edited). The web application is redeployed (in place). The browser is told to load the page automatically.
a servlet	yes	Run File (Shift-F6)	The changed file is saved and recompiled. The web app is redeployed. A dialog may open to confirm the value of the URL to open in the browser, relative to the context root of the web app. The IDE tells the browser to open using the context root and the relative URL.
A java file that isn't a servlet	yes	Run File (Shift-R6)	The java file is saved. If the class has a public static main(String[]), it gets run (just like a regular Java project). If the class doesn't have a main(), an error message is displayed.
any file	yes	Run Project (not bound by default)	Changes are saved. Any necessary compilations are done. The web app is directory deployed. The browser is opened and told to load the URL constructed from the values of the context root and the relative URL.
any file	no	Run Main Project (F6)	Changes are saved. Any necessary compilations are done. The web app is directory deployed. The browser is opened and told to load the URL constructed from the values of the context root and the relative URL.

I did notice one thing while working on some larger sample applications, that was a bit embarassing for me. In the past I have touted the joy of the save and reload development workflow. Once a project got beyond JSP development or I had multiple projects that I was integrating and testing, Run Main Project (F6), judicious management of the Main Project and its Relative Url were the things that helped keep me productive.
(2007-05-23 22:24:34.0) Permalink

what do tags do???? the ui for blog entry has a field with the label 'Tags'... since I like to learn by doing this pointless entry just to test tagging.... (2007-05-23 14:06:52.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Tuesday May 22, 2007

New GlassFish Integration Feature: New Per-Instance Options

Every now and again, an API that we use in the integration plugin gets deprecated. Sometimes these changes generate busy work. At other times, these changes force us to focus on code that "ain't broke", so we haven't fixed it.

The recent changes to the Options dialog have forced us to examine where the options associated with the plugin get displayed. When we did examine them, we found that the option used to disable directory deployment was at the wrong level. It was "global". That was a good choice in the plugin's early development, but now it seemed like the right "place" for this option was on the individual registered domains.

Once we started thinking about per-instance options a couple other candidates jumped out at us. Both of them are related to the timeouts applied to some operations in the IDE related to the server.

The first timeout is the amount of time the IDE (and therefore users) wait to find out that the IDE knows that server start-up has completed. It had been an unbearable 5+ minutes. In many cases this number can be significantly lower.

The second timeout was the amount of time that the IDE would allow a deployment operation to take, before assuming that the operation had failed. This could also be significantly lower.

One danger of lowering these values, was the potential that we dropped them too far and some valid user deployment configuration would stop working.

We decided to make sure that users could control these timeouts and be able to account for differences between server configurations, if they had to. So we created an additional tab, in the Server Manager UI for GlassFish and SJSAS domains.



Follow this link to a search for all of my entries about new GlassFish integration features for NetBeans 6.0. (2007-05-22 21:31:13.0) Permalink

New GlassFish Integration Feature: Profiler Integration Improvements

Some, like the folks on the profiler team, will argue that this is a bug fix and some, me, would say this is a new feature in the plugin. Regardless of what you call it, this is something that is new in 6.0.

When users tell NetBeans to profile a web application of other Java EE artifact targeted to GlassFish or SJSAS, they see this dialog:

Regardless of what item they picked from the list, the server would start under the JDK indicated by the AS_JAVA setting in the config/asenv.conf (or asenv.bat). This would not be a problem most of the time, since folks would run NetBeans and the App Server under the same JDK. But it could be.

In 6.0, the selected JDK is used to start the app server domain.


Follow this link to a search for all of my entries about new GlassFish integration features for NetBeans 6.0. (2007-05-22 00:43:02.0) Permalink

Monday May 21, 2007

New GlassFish Integration Feature: Shared Installation Registration

Many people have encountered problems when trying to register a domain, if the server bits have been installed by somebody else or via a mechanism like aptitude or Synaptic package manager on Ubuntu. The default domains are all read-only for "normal" users in these cases. That means that the list of available default local domains would be empty.

I have seen a number of pleas from folks who have tried all kinds of tricks to make the list of domains get filed in. As folks have tried more and more tricks, the resulting installation would become more and more broken.

The "correct" way to proceed has been available in the wizard for a long time. Users need to create a personal domain. I have responded to a number of e-mails with that answer and I swear I have heard the slapping of foreheads.

Well, I finally slapped my own forehead. I realized that the wizard needed to do a better job helping folks proceed past the second page. By changing the default selection from 'Register Local Default Domain' to 'Create Personal Domain' if the default local domains are not useful for this user, the user can just click Next to do the right thing. If the user has selected one of the other two options; Register Local Domain or Register Remote Domain, their choice is not disturbed.

Note: While I was writing this entry up, 
      I did find an edge case that needed
      to be addressed.  The changes to resolve
      that case were checked in yesterday.
      Using a build younger than 21 may 2007
      should function as described.

Saturday May 19, 2007

New GlassFish Integration Feature: Usage Profile Support

The rewrite of the editor has had a devastating effect on the number of new features that have been going into NetBeans 6.0 from the team that provides the Java EE functionality. Many have been struggling to get the feature list back to parity with NetBeans 5.5. I was also involved with trying to keep NetBeans 5.5.1 playing nicely with GlassFish V2.

I have been able to get some new things done in the integration plugin recently that I had not shared with folks. I hope to do that in the next few entries.

The first thing that I want to talk about is Profile support. Other resources on the web describe the GlassFish V2 usage profile feature so readers should check them out for more context. The one important thing to note is the fact that a domain is created for a particular usage profile.

The plugin has allowed users to create domains for GlassFish and SJSAS for some time. I have outlined the process for creating and registering a personal domain in previous entries. I have modified the second "page" of the registration wizard to allow users to select a profile.

If the users is creating a domain based on earlier version of the SJSAS or GlassFish releases, the only available value is Default.

The 'enterprise' profile has dependencies on HADB. If you don't have it installed, you won't be able to advance past this page of the wizard, if you select that profile. This is a difference from the way the asadmin subcommand create-domain behaves. It lets you create the domain, but the domain won't start until you install HADB.

Follow this link to a search for all of my entries about new GlassFish integration features for NetBeans 6.0.
(2007-05-19 11:45:59.0) Permalink