NetBeans

A GUI Painter Friendly Table Component

Submitted by gunnar on

In the early days of Java, GUI forms were written, not drawn. They were created by writing code that instantiated components and added them to containers with various layout constraints. Then the program was run and the result could be admired. This way of working, WYGIWYG (what you get is what you get) was often quite fun, more often frustrating, and never very productive. Today we have a JavaBeans specification and integrated development environments (IDEs) with GUI painters.

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Putting NetBeans log directory on a temporary file system

Submitted by gunnar on

Whenever you do something, anything, in NetBeans, it will write to the uigestures file in the NetBeans log directory, .netbeans/8.2/var/log for NetBeans 8.2. I finally got tired of hearing my disk being written to every time I pressed a key so I decided to put the log directory on a temporary file system in memory. I imagine this will also be good for the future health of an SSD drive.

I'm using OpenSUSE Leap so there may be variations on other distros.

Copying NetBeans GUI components in KDE and Plasma 5

Submitted by gunnar on

For some time now, it has not been possible to copy GUI components in the NetBeans GUI editor. Apparently, the KDE clipboard doesn't play well with NetBeans GUI copying. Until Plasma 5 arrived, the clipboard tray icon was provided by klipper and you could get GUI copying to work by just selecting Quit from the tray icon popup menu. Klipper was even nice enough to ask if you want it to start again automatically at next login. Of course, you didn't need to log out and log in again, you just called up krunner with Alt+F2 and typed klipper.

Debugging bean customizers and property editors in NetBeans

Submitted by gunnar on

When you are developing GUI components you may want to create some nice bean customizers and property editors for them. But how do you debug them? The NetBeans developers may smile at this, knowing that there is a much better way, but I don't so smile away...

The trick is to start a new NetBeans instance in debugging mode. This is a built in feature of NetBeans module projects so we first need a simple NetBeans module. It doesn't have to do anything so you can create it in less than a minute using the New Project wizard: