Visual Web Application and JPA

Today I want to point to a couple of articles Contributed by Winston Prakash, maintained by Beth Stearns about Visual Web Pack in NetBeans 6 and the more useful option to use JPA to bind component.
Now instead bind a table ind a DB with a VWP table component and edit directly to the DB you can obtain data as entities and put it in the visual table component.

http://www.netbeans.org/kb/60/web/web-jpa.html
http://www.netbeans.org/kb/60/web/web-jpa-part2.html

Open Clip Art Library is on !!!

After some months changing the hosting and interface OpenClipArt Library are on fire one more time.
I love it.

NetBeans OpenGL pack

Via PlanetNetBeans and a Roumen's post I have found out a new plugin for NetBeans to work with OpenGL:

netbeans-opengl-pack - Take a look at the screenshots page:

Visual diff

Today, via the Core Dump neighbor I found meld.
I usually work with NetBeans or Eclipse. Both needs you have open one or more projects to compare its files. I was looking for a tool like the 'diff' command line tool but more user friendly.

I think meld is it (and it is included as a package in Ubuntu).

Coloring nodes

NetBeans brings platform developers a way to improve node labels using simplified subset of HTML tags.
You can see it in action here in the nodes API tutorial.

Supposing you have a subclass of Node or AbstractNode classes, the only thing you need to do is override the getHtmlDisplayName() method.

@Override
public String getHtmlDisplayName() {
String name;

if(updateState) {
name = "Name";
} else {
name = "RED Name";
}

return name;
}


This peace of code returns the name of the node depending on the 'updateState' attribute. If something is wrong then the name is rendered in red.

Also, the 'updateState' can change in any moment, then only you need to do is to fire that display node name has changed with:

fireDisplayNameChange(oldName, newName);


Take in account that the old and new names must be different. If not, the fire method won't have any effect.

Communicating with the User (and Yourself)

(From Geertjan's Weblog)

If you use System.out and the JOptionPane to communicate with your users, or with yourself during debugging or testing, you might be interested in knowing about similar (better!) facilities that the NetBeans APIs make available...

Read...

Presentations from Sun Tech Days

Today I want to point to this post from Charles Ditzel blog with a list of the available presentations of Sun Tech Days.

Closing JPA EntityManger in web applications

I want to note this post from my neighborhood JavaNotepad.

When working with resources it's always important to ensure they are closed when not longer needed.
Working with JPA there are two kind of resources we can take care of: EntityManager and transactions.

Read...

Status line elements order, build number and other thips

Some time ago I read this interview to Emilian Bold
http://platform.netbeans.org/articles/nbm_interview_emilian.html

here you can learn some useful tips (like the build number version I was looking for).

Hiding tabs

Follow the Geertjan post:
http://blogs.sun.com/geertjan/entry/farewell_to_space_consuming_weird
you can know how to hide the tabs on your NB applications.