Bruno Ghisi's Blog

Community: NetBeans Archives

Starting with Sun SPOT using NetBeans 6.1

If you do not have a Sun SPOT (Figure 1), do not be bored, you can still have a lot of fun! In this entry, I gonna explain how to start programming the world using NetBeans 6.1!

Figure 1: Sun SPOT rulez!!!

Downloading NetBeans IDE 6.1

Installing Sun SPOT plugin

Getting Sun SPOT SDK 3.0 Beta

Creating the Demo Application

    protected void startApp() throws MIDletStateChangeException {

        System.out.println("Hello, world");

        new BootloaderListener().start();   // monitor the USB (if connected) and recognize commands from host


        long ourAddr = Spot.getInstance().getRadioPolicyManager().getIEEEAddress();

        System.out.println("Our radio address = " + IEEEAddress.toDottedHex(ourAddr));

        ISwitch sw1 = EDemoBoard.getInstance().getSwitches()[EDemoBoard.SW1];

        leds[0].setRGB(100,0,0);                // set color to moderate red

        while (sw1.isOpen()) {                  // done when switch is pressed

            leds[0].setOn();                    // Blink LED

            Utils.sleep(250);                   // wait 1/4 seconds

            leds[0].setOff();

            Utils.sleep(1000);                  // wait 1 second

        }

        notifyDestroyed();                      // cause the MIDlet to exit

    }

Running the Demo Application in the emulator

Where I go next?

Building a Java ME Bluetooth chat in 12 minutes...

As it was announced before, Marge 0.5 is out. In this post, I am going to demonstrate an interesting new feature called AutoConnect. AutoConnect is indeed to automatically connect Bluetooth devices. It has some limitations due to some bad implementations and has some scenarios that maybe it is not the best option, but still very interesting and is definitely awesome to make something with a few lines of code! For more information about the new release and this feature, please check http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Mobileandembedded/HowTo05.

So, nothing better than show a video... [sometimes I think I should have done cinema :) ]... Anyway, if you have not seen any Marge videos yet, try "Project Marge Interview", "My laptop is detecting my presence" and "Giant Blue Pong (my Bluetooth Atari)". Too much talk, take a look at the new "Building a Java ME Bluetooth chat in 12 minutes..." too. Could you not understand what happened in Netbeans code editor? Neither do I!!! It is better to download the full video (30MB). Hope you enjoy!

If you want more about Marge, go to http://marge.dev.java.net. If you want to help, please send an email to owner@marge.dev.java.net. We would love to hear suggestions and have you in our team!

Go ahead! Marge your Bluetooth app!

My First JRuby Bluetooth App

• Download Netbeans IDE 6 (Select All package version, because it comes with Java and Ruby).
• Get marge-core in Marge repository (you can use Netbeans to checkout from Subversion and generate a jar, because the last version is under development and was not launched yet, we are working on it :) ). Otherwise download the last launched version (0.4.0) and fix the inquiry method.
• Get a JSR 82 implementation, I have used Avetana for Linux. I have explained it in another post, you can take a look here.

1. Create a Ruby Project: File -> New Project -> Ruby -> Ruby Application. Click Next, configure your project (create a main.rb file and use a JRuby interpreter) and then click Finish.
2. Add marge-core and Avetana. Right click in the project -> Properties -> Java and then add the jars in the JRuby classpath.
3. Add the following code into main.rb. The code is pretty intuitive, because Ruby is! It basically imports some Marge classes (that are going to use Avetana internally), defines a listener that will be called during the inquiry and will print all the devices found. Also, the inquiry will be started by the singleton DeviceDiscoverer.



include Java

include_class 'net.java.dev.marge.inquiry.DeviceDiscoverer'
include_class 'net.java.dev.marge.inquiry.InquiryListener'

puts 'Inquiring for Bluetooth Devices'
discoverer = DeviceDiscoverer.instance;

class InquiryListenerAppender 
    include InquiryListener
  def inquiryCompleted(remoteDevices)
    remoteDevices.each { |device| print "#{device.bluetooth_address} - #{device.get_friendly_name true} \n"  }
  end
  def inquiryError
    puts 'Inquiry Error'
  end
  def deviceDiscovered(device,deviceClass)
  end
end

discoverer.start_inquiry_giac InquiryListenerAppender.new

Developing OpenOffice.org Extensions in Java!

Hello guys!

It's Friday! It's already December! What a great day to write about OpenOffice.org, which is lovely abbreviated as OOo. A lot of people have asked me about how mOOo Impress Controller was built. I am not too old yet - getting older this Sunday :) - but I have some stories to tell.

In the begining of this year, I was at fisl 8.0 (International Free Software Forum)*, which is one of the biggest open source Latin America conferences and happens in the south of Brazil. If you like to talk about software, open source, Linux, culture, meet people, etc, etc, etc you should be there once! The 8th edition was definitely very special, I have met a lot of nice people, including people from Mobile & Embedded Community and Louis Suarez Potts. Please, froze this part, because we will get back here later, but now I have to start a new paragraph. As you can see, this post looks like that crazy movies that goes forward and reward, starts from the end... yeah, and this entry really starts from the end, if you have looked in the RSS description, I have written "You can develop extensions for your OpenOffice.org suite... with Java! Wow! There is a huge community around it, plugins to make your life easy, good documentation... so, what are you waiting for?!"... don't worry, we will get there.

At that time of fisl 8.0, I had a very experimental demo running on Eclipse. The demo was made of two applications written in Java: a mobile (Java ME/MIDP) and a desktop (Java SE) one. The mobile was able to communicate, over Bluetooth, with the desktop side and the both used a XML protocol to interact. So, the mobile was able to navigate through the desktop file system, filtering for all the Impress OOo presentations that was being found. Also, the mobile was able to send a request to start a presentation file and after started, it was able to control the presentation, advancing and going back in the slides. It was something like that, but, as you guys know Murphy's Law, things are not always perfect and I can guarantee things get worse when you deal with demo applications. Anyway, the demo was not completely integrated with OOo, it was a just a demo invoking OOo Api. So, regarding what I have said in the last paragraph, I have met Louis and he was the guy that has gave the motivation to create a real OOo extension, after he has explained more about what was that, how Java would help that and son on.

After the event, Lucas Torri and I have completely rewritten that demo as an Add-On extension, which later was called mOOo Impress Controller. So, we are now in the main part of this entry: you can easily create OOo extensions in Java. I said easily! There are plugins for Eclipse and for Netbeans IDE (help localizing it to your language). Basically, to put any of those plugins working, you just need to install an OOo SDK and also have an OOo suite or any other compatible installed, for example, StarOffice. Just be careful with the versions to keep things working fine. Get started now! Here it goes very useful links:

• OpenOffice.org Api
• OpenOffice.org Wiki
• OpenOffice.org Developer's Guide
• GullFOSS (OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun's Blog)
• Subscribe in the extensions user list
• Subscribe in the extensions dev list
• Article from Netbeans Magazine Issue 3: OpenOffice.org NetBeans Integration (Great to start, it is pretty easy to deal with those wizards described!)
• OpenOffice.org Extensions repository (Many nice extensions appearing every day!)

Go ahead! Make something that looks like your way! Automate any task that you always wanted in your suite! Make something different! Let me know!!!

Have a great weekend!

Bruno Ghisi

What's coming in NetBeans Mobility Pack 6.0?

• A lot of change in UI (User Interface) stuff in order to improve usability, like in the Projects Window you will not only see the packages, but now you will see things divided into Source Package, Resources, Project Configuration.
• Project Configuration Management was improved, so now it is easy to add Configurations and manipulate them, in order to, for example, have different deploys for your application and easily make them directly in the Projects Window.
• Mobility Deployment Manager was upgraded to allow you to create several instances of each deployment type - such as File Copy, FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and new types that were inserted - and then associate any of these instances to a Project Configuration.
• Web Services API (JSR 172) stub compiler was rewritten and now have support for Base64 type, it is able to parse documentation from methods and has a better generated code.
• One of my favorites... Visual Mobile Designer (VMD) 2 is coming! In this new version, we will have a lot of improvements in terms of functionality and usability, some of them are: its UI has changed a lot (this new style looks better!), an Analyzer that shows what commands and/or resources were no longer being used and shows a MIDP-1.0 compliancy checker. You have new things in your Pallete too:
• In Flow area (easier to make and understand MIDlets flow graphically with these new stuff!): Entry Point (represents a method), Call Point (represents a code fragment), If (flow forking based on a specific condition), Switch (similar to If but you can specify Switch Case on it), List Action (you can put in a Command, so the List containing the Command will have a method to process the List Element that was selected, by default, all the List have a Command like that, but needs to be setted true to be showed), Previous Screen Action (an icon that represents to go to the previous screen, really useful for Back Buttons).
• Displayables area (Four new Custom Components): FileBrowser (is a List) for the JSR 75 FileConnection Optional Package, PIMBrowser (is a List) for the JSR 75 PIM Optional Package, LoginScreen (is a Canvas) for authentication purposes with username and password, SMSComposer (is a Canvas) for sending SMS (Short Message Service) easily. You can fin them at $NETBEANS6_HOME/mobility8/modules/ext/nb_midp_components.jar.
• One of the biggest features was the merge of CDC and CLDC in a unique Mobility Pack (CDC development got a lot of evolution because of that too).
• Game developers will like that: in this new pack we are going to have the Game Builder, which is a visual editing support for MIDP 2.0 Game API including creation and editing of Sprites, TiledLayers and their arrangement into Scenes.

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