Toni Epple's Blog

Sometimes you want to be able to change your RCP’s look and feel at runtime, here’s how:

* In one of your applications Modules add a dependency on Windowsystem API

* Create a new Action in your Module and implement actionPerformed:

public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
try {
UIManager.setLookAndFeel(new MetalLookAndFeel());
Frame frame = WindowManager.getDefault().getMainWindow();
SwingUtilities.updateComponentTreeUI(frame);
frame.pack();

} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
}
}

* Run your application and invoke the action. The Look and feel will be updated…

NetBeans has some custom UI components, so not every third party look & feel you use will result in a nice look because UI Delegates might be missing. ( Try Google to find the matching UI delegates to fix this. )

I’ve just downloaded it:

http://bits.netbeans.org/download/6.7/m2/

I’m playing with Maven again to see how the NetBeans RCP archetypes evolve. There are several articles to get started. I tried a lot of them but failed miserably because there’s so much development going on in this area and everything is changing really fast :-). The one article that took me closest to success is this one by Geertjan. So here are two little hints what I did to finally get it working:

* In step 4 of Geertjan’s tutorial make sure that after you’ve entered your details to the table at the bottom the text is really saved. I do so by clicking into a different field of the table after entering the text, enter (as proposed in Gj’s blog) should be ok as well. I failed to create the Application several times, because that stupid wizard thought the field was empty :-).

* You don’t need step 5 anymore, because that bug seems to be fixed, but there’s a new one:

* When I press “Run” nothing happens: To fix that I opened the project properties and in the actions section had a look at the “run project” action. It wasn’t bound at all. Enter “nbm:cluster nbm:run-platform” under “Execute goals” (I looked up the settings in an old project under 6.01).

* If still nothing happens or you get a Class not found Error, make sure there are no blanks in your projects path! This also took me a while to figure out

So with these little modifications it works nicely and my app is running.

Here’s an interesting underdocumented feature I just stumbled upon: Sometimes you want to create a unit test that depends on classes in a different module e.g. MyOtherModule. That’s easy to do, you just need to right-click the Unit test Libraries Node in your Module and click “Add Unit Test Dependency” and choose MyOtherModule in the dialog. But what if you want to rely on the Tests defined in that Module or their Helper classes?

They aren’t included by this approach, but you can easily change this:

* After adding the Module where the Tests and Helper classes sit, a Node representing the dependency will show in the projects tab under your modules Unit Test Dependencies.

* Right-click that Node and choose “Edit” from the popup Menu.

* In the Dialog choose “Include Tests of Module”

* In case your Editor doesn’t recognize the new dependency, good old “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” will do the trick…

Now you can use the classes. Thanks Fabrizio for finding this hidden feature!

There used to be some documents on how to create functional tests for RCP apps wit XTest. But since 6.5 the new Simpletest API has been created to make it easier to create tests for platform applications. It really got easier… but somehow also harder, because there’s not much information around about how to do it…

My fellow DreamTeam member Tom Wheeler made a really good start and helped fixing some initial bugs. He has also created a Wiki Page with a downloadable working example of tests ported from the old xtest infrastructure. The part about how to setup a new test for a Module is still missing, so I thought I’d give it a try and - as soon as I find the time - add it to the Wiki:

* In your Platform Application add the harness cluster and add MultiView Windows + Visual Library from platform9

* In your Module go to the files tab, in the test dir create folders qa-functional/src

* Restart your IDE ( I really found no better way ), you should now have two new Nodes in your Module’s Project Tab: Functional Test Packages and Functional Test Libraries

* Right-click the Functional Test Libraries –> Add Functional Test Depencdencies, then add jemmy, nbjunit, jellytools platform and junit4

* Open your project.xml (Project Metadata) and add the recursive tag to the nbjunit dependency:

<test-dependency>
<code-name-base>org.netbeans.modules.nbjunit</code-name-base>
<compile-dependency/>
<recursive/>
</test-dependency>

* Now you should be ready to create your Test. The tooling isn’t as comfortable as before, so you have no Wizards for a JellyTestCase anymore (at least as far as I’ve seen), but after you created the class that extends JellyTestCase you can proceed as described here, but be aware of some changes. For more information on JellyTools and how you can write your own tests and operators look here.

That’s in short how you can set up a new functional Test for  a platform app. If you find better or more comfortable ways to do that, let me know, I’d really be interested in that …

I was reading Jonathan Schwartz’s latest blog entry about JavaFX reaching 100 000 000 downloads. That’s really impressive, but what I liked even more about the article are some remarks about client side Java:

“First, freely distributed, open source software will continue to create enormous revenue opportunities for those that understand the underlying business model - as an example, the Java business for Sun, last quarter, delivered more than $67m in billings, up nearly 50% year over year. On an annualized basis, that means the Java client business (as distinct from the Java server business) is now a multi-hundred million dollar business, opening doors for Sun, and the Java community, across the planet. All built on freely available runtimes and source code. Free as in beer, free as in speech, and free as in market. ” (Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog)

That’s really fantastic news and it really matches my impressions about the adoption of Java on the desktop here in my small world. The number of companies building their desktop applications with Java is really growing here in Germany. Recently I’ve been talking to a publisher about his experience, and he said they see a growing demand especially for books about RCP Platforms. Sold books on a subject are a good indicator for where the market is going…  and our local JUG has become some kind of a job market over the last weeks: “all the poor former Sun and IBM employees…” you might think - but the opposite is true: Companies are sending their job offerings looking for Java developers by the dozen. It’s really amazing to see all this happening despite the financial crisis… Looks to me like Java (on desktop & Server) is stronger than ever.

When you’re developing an RCP app in a language other than default English, you need an international Version of the platform. The easiest way to get one is to download the international edition of NetBeans. Since NetBeans respects the Locale settings -German in my case- I would have to develop with a german version of NB. But I don’t want that! I can’t find the menus any more because I’m used to the english names and german words are much longer than english ones, so the menu takes away too much space…

To change the locale you need to open your <install-dir>/etc/netbeans.conf and change the default options:

netbeans_default_options=”–locale en ….

Now everythings back to normal. You can use the same switch in your RCP app to change the locale and try out different language versions. in your suite’s project.properties add:

run.args.extra=–locale fr

to see the french version for example. There’s just one problem remaining: When you create a distrbution NB won’t copy the language bundles (with some strange exceptions…), so you will only be able to run the applcation in english unless you copy all the required bundles to your distribution manually. In my next tip (#17) I will show how to automatize that…

… was really interesting for the NetBeans community. The most important news item is that the NetBeans Release Cycle has been changed. Sven Reimer’s has posted an article about the announcement from Sun. So we will have more frequent releases in the future. The upcoming version planned for June is going to be 6.7. Hm, maybe this book title will change as well… 6.7 M2 is going to be released next week. I really hope that all the nice platform features like the customizable Windows will be in there too, but as far as I know they are. Although I feel sorry that we won’t have the next big bang release in June, I guess short term planning is a wise decision in these times…

Also this week the NetBeans Governance Board Elections have begun and it’s basically impossible to make a bad choice here ;-).

Let’s see what the next week brings… ( hopefully it’s downloadable and great )

When you’re developing a NB Platform application you can use the “run.extra.args=-J-Xmx256m” pattern in your project or platform properties files, but when you’re building the Zip distribution those settings are lost, so you have to unpack the zip and add your changes manually. That’s a bit annoying when you do many small releases for testing.

One solution to this would be to change the template file in your build harness and add your settings there, but if you’re working in a team and don’t share the harness, that will only apply to your local machine, and it will affect all applications developed with this harness, which may be an unwanted side-effect.

A better way is to override the “build-launchers” ant target which is responsible for copying the app.conf from the harness dir:

1. In the project view navigate to your suite’s “important files” folder double-click the “build script” node to open your build.xml in the editor.

2. Expand the “build-script” node and locate the “build-launchers” target, right click and choose “open” from the menu.  This will open up your suite.xml.

3. You can now copy the whole target and add it to your build.xml.

4. Right before the closing tag add this:

<replace file=”${build.launcher.dir}/etc/${app.name}.conf” token=”-Xmx64m” value=”-Xmx256m”></replace>
</target>

5. Now build your zip distribution, your applications .conf file (located in etc and named like your application with the .conf extension) will hold the updated value.

This is not the only way to do this, actually there are many alternatives:

you could e.g. copy your own conf template there instead of the one from the harness, or write a target that doesn’t override everything, but call the original to be more compatible with furture changes, or you could put your harness in svc and have a different one fore each app. Feel free to play around and let me know if you’ve found a nice trick…

When you’re branding your application you usually replace existing icons with your own icons. But you can even “replace” icons that don’t exist at all :-). I had this idea reading a tip about Icon Branding on NetBeans Zone. Since NetBeans actions are using the iconBase approach it should be possible to add icons that are not there by default. For example most of the actions don’t supply an icon for rollover effects, and they rely on the default for disabled icons (which is the original displayed in greyscale). By adding these missing icons to your banding folder or module you can supply the missing parts and add a rollover effect for actions that didn’t have one before :-). In this branding Folder I have added a rollover icon (cut_rollover.gif) for the default cut action in the toolbar:

Have fun pimping your RCP app!