[ 13 Sep ][ Newsletter ]: Issue 25 of the monthly NetBeans Edge, by Ro

Gut feel
What do you believe is true?

Chat Transcript: Project Looking Glass
Where did the original Looking Glass idea come from? Read the answer to this and other interesting questions about Project Looking Glass, a project that explores the next generation (3-dimensional) desktop.

Java Hacker's Worksheet preview/Color Calculator

Java Hacker's Worksheet preview/Color Calculator
As part of the ongoing "jga: Generic Algorithms for Java"project (http://jga.sf.net), I've been experimenting with a spreadsheet-like control where the cells contain arbitrary java object, described by a java-based expression language. A first cut of this idea is now viewable...

What's New in Swing?
A new skinnable look and feel (Synth), printing support for |JTable| components, the ability to add components directly to a frame, these are a few of the new features in Swing for J2SE 5.0. Learn more in this transcript of a recent chat held with two key members of the Swing engineering team: Scott Violet and Shannon Hickey.

Desktop Java Live: Chapter Refactor ... Suggestions Welcome

I've been thinking about the idea of refactoring the TOC and chapters of Desktop Java Live. Here is the first pass of thoughts:

This first section is similar to the original. The layout managers chapter has been split and the chapters have been reordered. I think I'll also split the threading chapter. The basic idea of the EDT, Spin, Foxtrot, and possibly Swing Worker can be covered in chapter 5.

Chapter 1: Introducing the Rich Client
Chapter 2: Layout Managers
Chapter 3: GUI Builders
Chapter 4: Look and Feel
Chapter 5: Basic Swing Threading

I've tried to reorder the next section of chapters to align with the construction of our sample rss reader application.

Chapter 6: Input Validation/Binding
Binding / Validation can be covered while contructing the basic forms for our reader.

Chapter 7: GUI Commands
The gui-commands project can be illustrated while providing functionality for our application and tying it into menus and toolbars.

Chapter 8: Events &Messaging
The firing of application level events can be discussed while adding RSS parsing and display to the sample app.

Chapter 9: Advanced Threading
In this chapter we can look at advanced threading while multi-threading rss feed processing.

Chapter 10: Application Packaging/Deployment
Finally, we can tie things together with Java Webstart and packaging options for our application.

Chapter 11: TabContainer
In this chapter we can discuss the nicely designed Netbeans TabContainer while adding multi tab functionality.

Chapter 12: Communication – Transports
Chapter 13: Communications – Channel Design
In these chapters I'm thinking of adding a server component for our application for feed sharing between users.

Chapter 14: Testing GUI Applications
Testing our application.

The main reservation I have about this order is pushing off the communications channel chapters. However, it is hard to add additional server functionality until the base application is written. I would also welcome reader thoughts and having the testing chapter as 14. Part of me thinks it should be earlier. However, I think the other topics have higher priority.

Update:
The first comment added below mentions Glazed Lists. It next to impossible to tackle all the concepts people want in a linear order that makes sense for the sample application. Would it make sense to just reference examples of the sample application not neccessarily presenting everything in order? The two examples that come to mind are the previously mentioned Glaze Lists and JDIC on down the line for sys tray and browser integration.

Using JConsole to Monitor Applications
JConsole is the Java Monitoring and Management Console, a new graphical tool shipped in J2SE JDK 5.0. This article describes how JConsole can be used to observe information about an application running on the Java platform, with an overview of the J2SE 5.0 monitoring and management architecture and how JConsole plugs into the architecture.

The object, the GUI, the services et al.

The object, the GUI, the services et al.
One of the problems I?d come across while writing ClassRenderer was creating room for custom GUI logic. This is very easy in an MVC framework since there is a controller and a view, both of which the programmer can access. Here, however, all the programmer can (and should) access while coding is the object model itself. This makes it a tad difficult to add logic to the GUI objects, not to mention those bound to nested objects.

[ 09 Dec ][ News ]: NetBeans Win an iPod Competition
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