Michael Nascimento Santos's Blog

June 2005 Archives

JavaBlogs.com.br is back

JavaBlogs.com.br - or Jablo, as some people call it - is a valuable resource to Java developers that can read Portuguese. Although their names are similar, it has little to do with javablogs.com, a service mantained by Atlassian that aggregates several other blogs. Jablo is actually a Roller instance customized for the pt-BR locale - at least, as customized as possible given it is maintained by volunteers.

There were several problems with the site due to bugs in Roller; it would crash and become unavailable for several days, at times. To make matters worse, the company who used to host Jablo for free was about to start charging the site for its services and nobody was willing to afford these costs (traffic was pretty high when it was running fine and the price charged was based on it...).

I got to know all this during an informal chat session with the official Jablo maintainer, Franklin Samir, from PortalJava. It immediately occured to me that Rick Ross, from JavaLobby, could help us. So, to make it short, now JavaBlogs.com.br is hosted on JavaLobby, using their customized, fine-tuned and much more stable Roller installation.

The funny thing is most people are not even aware the site is working, since it went through a long period of inactivity and all of its URLs have changed. This means that, if you were subscribed to any feed from the site, you have to update its address. Basically, the URLs changed from www.javablogs.com.br/blogs/page/user to www.javablogs.com.br/page/user and RSS feeds should now be accessed using a www.javablogs.com.br/rss/user pattern. If you can read Portuguese, visit the site and take advantage of the knowledge shared by the Brazilian community. If you can write in Portuguese, create your own blog there!

Thinlet plugins for NetBeans

Module development for NetBeans is something I've always been interested in, but never had the time to do. This time, however, I was able to; the ThinNB project at java.net adds Thinlet support for the NetBeans IDE.

From the ThinNB project home page, "ThinNB is actually two things: an umbrella project for the ThinNB family of NetBeans modules and also the module responsible for installing the ThinNB Update Center in the IDE." It recognizes Thinlet xml files, adds a new template for a xml file with a panel as it root node, allow files to be previewed inside the IDE, adds support to an embedded visual editor - a modified version of ThinG - and also installs an Update Center in the IDE so it is possible to obtain new releases of the modules in a more natural way.

You can go to the home page to see some screenshots, get information about its features and also read the download and installation instructions. Enjoy it!

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