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Archive for the ‘NetBeans’ Category

Developing A Simple Pluggable Java Application

September 20th, 2009 James 13 comments

Most of the applications we use on daily basis are pluggable. Popular applications like Firefox, Eclipse, NetBeans, JEdit, Wordpress, Hudson are all pluggable. In fact, pluggability has played a major part in the success of most of these applications. Why not make the Java applications we develop pluggable as well? Yes, we get pluggability out of the box, if our applications are based on a rich client platform like NetBeans or Eclipse. But for some reasons if you decide not to use those platforms, it doesn’t mean that they should not be pluggable. In this article, we will learn how to write a simple pluggable application that will load it’s plugins dynamically.

The API
First, let us define a plugin interface that should be implemented by all the plugins of our application. We are going to keep it very simple. Create a project called “plugin-api” in your favorite IDE and create the interface “ApplicationPlugin”.


package com.pluggableapp.plugins.api;

public interface ApplicationPlugin
{
    String getName();
    void init();
}

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What UML Tools do you use?

August 26th, 2009 James 22 comments

Recently I read the article “Free UML tools” which explains about the various free UML tools available. That article made me think “What UML tool do people actually use?”. Over the years, I have used tools like Microsoft Visio, ArgoUML, NetBeans UML, StarUML and finally settled with JUDE. How about you? What UML tools do you use? Some of you might use more than one tool (at work, at home etc), so feel free to choose all the options applicable.

What UML tools do you use?

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Readers choice: Most popular Subversion clients

August 25th, 2009 James No comments

Subversion is a very popular version control system. As a result, subversion has a wide array of client tools which makes life difficult for us, the users. So we wanted to know what our readers actually use and here is the summary of their opinions.

Not surprisingly, close to 50% of them use the popular TortoiseSVN as their client.

The only limiting factor of this wildly popular tool is that it is available only for Windows.

Surprisingly, the second most popular choice for users is their IDE (like Eclipse, NetBeans etc). 30% users are satisfied with the support provided by their IDE. I hope this user base will only increase in future as the IDEs offer more sophisticated support not just for Subversion but also for other popular version control systems.

NetBeans

But there are some limiting factor in using the IDE as the Subversion client. The support, in most cases (atleast in NetBeans), is limited to only the projects you are working from the IDE. That’s where the third popular Subversion client comes into picture.

The third choice of the users is the Subversion command line client which comes bundled with Subversion.

To be frank, the command line client is what all you need with the only limiting factor being it’s “command line” nature :-) . Whenever the tool you use falls short in certain scenarios, the command line client can be your life saver. 14% of users vow by the Subversion command line client and I believe most of them are Linux users.

RapidSVN comes at the distant fourth garnering only 5% of votes.

Going by the comments, SmartSVN is preferred by a couple of users and so is nautilus scripts, nautilussvn, git-svn, kdesvn.

I have used SmartSVN for a while and I would say it’s almost on par with TortoiseSVN. The biggest advantage of SmartSVN is it’s cross platform nature while the biggest drawback is that it’s not opensource. NautilusSVN has big potential as it attempts to become the TortoiseSVN for linux.

Thanks for everyone who participated in the poll “What is your favourite Subversion client?

If you use any other Subversion client, please let us know.

Read more about Subversion at the dedicated SolitaryGeek Subversion category.

 

Hudson CI Server – A quick start guide

July 24th, 2009 James 7 comments

Introduction

Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily – leading to multiple integrations per day.
- Martin Fowler

Hudson is a popular open-source continuous integration server used by many organizations like Redhat JBoss. Though there are many well known and well established open-source projects like CruiseControl, Continnum and some commercial offerings like Bamboo, what makes Hudson special is it’s powerful yet easy to use web interface, it’s simplicity and it’s extensible architecture with many plugins.

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NetBeans 6.7 – A quick glance

July 7th, 2009 James 6 comments

NetBeans 5.0 – Simplified Swing development
NetBeans 5.5 – Simplified Java EE development
NetBeans 6.0 – Made the NetBeans editor and other core infrastructure on par with competitors
NetBeans 6.5 – Looked beyond Java development by supporting languages like PHP
NetBeans 7.0 6.7 – Tries to make collaborative team development seamless.

I was quick to download the “All Java” pack of NetBeans IDE for linux. Installation, as usual was pretty smooth on my Ubuntu 9.04. The installation didn’t give me much surprises and it was very much similar to version 6.5. I customized the installer to install Glassfish v2.1 and Tomcat 6.0.18 for me.

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Getting NetBeans ready for work on Ubuntu 8.10

February 4th, 2009 James 10 comments

Now that you have upgraded from Windows to Ubuntu (like me :-) ), let’s see how to setup NetBeans quickly on your new Ubuntu machine without wasting much time.

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Categories: Java, Linux, NetBeans Tags: ,

Ubuntu 8.10 – A Productive Java Development Environment

December 13th, 2008 James 18 comments

I recently started using Ubuntu 8.10 at my workplace as well. Till then, I have been using Ubuntu only at home. For me, Ubuntu@Work was very different from Ubuntu@Home. I mostly surf, blog, listen to music and play some games at home. But Ubuntu@Work was a completely different scenario.

Since I’m new to this linux stuff, it took me some time to configure things like static ip address, host names etc. But once everything was setup, things started moving quickly. I initially had doubt in my minds about the font rendering of NetBeans (or any swing app for that matter) under linux. I even wrote an post showing my frustration with NetBeans font rendering when compared to Eclipse. But with jdk.1.6.10, font rendering is smooth and NetBeans works like a champ! You can see some samples here:

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And now NetBeans 6.5 is there in my Ubuntu-8.10

November 30th, 2008 James 10 comments

NetBeans is my favourite IDE for java development. I’ve been using NetBeans from version 4.1 onwards and I can’t believe that it has progressed and transformed itself so well. Right from version 5.0 onwards, NetBeans has been making amazing strides in terms of developer adoption. And the recent 6.5 release is really fantastic. It’s fast, it’s responsive and got many new cool features. Though I use NetBeans at office which runs on Windows XP, I haven’t tried that yet on my Ubuntu-8.10. So, I thought it’s time to give it a go.

Installing NetBeans in Ubuntu in very easy. The only pre-requisite for installation is to have a suitable JDK on your machine. That too is not a problem if you download the NetBeans + JDK bundle. But I thought of installing them separately. By default, Ubuntu-8.10 doesn’t come with JDK pre-installed, so you have to install it manually. Installing JDK in Ubuntu is just a matter of issuing a “one line” command. Just open your terminal and type:

“sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk”

or, if you are a person who prefer GUI more than command line, open your Synaptic Package Manager and look for “sun-java6-jdk” and install it. What surprised me though was the availability of the latest JDK, i.e, “JDK 6 Update 10″. Installing JDK had never been so easy.

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Categories: Java, Linux, NetBeans Tags: ,

Subversion and NetBeans – A quick start guide

April 7th, 2008 James 22 comments

Introduction:

Subversion is arguably the most popular version control system as of now. No wonder NetBeans has very good support for Subversion. I personally feel that a java developer must be familiar with both these tools. This article shall help you to get started with both these tools.

Objectives:

- To create a simple java project in NetBeans.

- To import the java project into the subversion repository.

- To commit the changes made in a java source file.

- To view the revision history of a java source file which was changed.

- To rollback to the previous revision of the java source file.

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NetBeans 6.1 stands up to its promise

March 8th, 2008 James 8 comments

NetBeans team just released their 6.1 Beta release and I was itching my hands to try it out. I’ve been using NetBeans from 5.0 release onwards (Matisse converted me from Intellij IDEA to NetBeans). I can see the progress NetBeans is making at an astonishing rate. (That too as an open source project)

Though I like and use NetBeans 6.0 a lot, I found it to be very slow when compared to Eclipse 3.3. I have explained about it here.

Especially I felt that code completion needed improvement. Eclipse beats NetBeans hands down in this area for sure.

So when the 6.1 Beta release promised me that “improved performance” is the theme of the release, I thought of trying it out.

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Categories: Java, NetBeans Tags: