Richard Bair's Blog

October 2005 Archives

Netbeans and Ant -- it's a wonderful union

I've been developing with NetBeans for almost a year now. I always thought the Ant integration was pretty good. Today I found a new integration feature that I didn't know existed before, but was really cool. So I thought I'd share.

In NetBeans, for any project that has a build.xml file, click on the "Files" tab, and then select build.xml. Now, check out the Navigator (if the Navigator window isn't open, choose Window | Navigator, or ctrl+7). The Navigator should show all of the ant targets available in the build.xml file (including targets in included build files).

Now for the fun part. Click some target (if you're using swinglabs build.xml file, click "get-from-cvs"). Right click the selected target and choose "Create Shortcut...". Now, you can choose to associate that target for that build.xml file with a menu item, toolbar button, etc! I created a special "Build SwingLabs" button on my toolbar.

Cool.

JIC -- Java Icon File Format

Tired of "dealing with a dozen png representations of a single (logical) icon as separated files"? Tired of writing/debugging the code to treat multiple files as a single logical unit? Well, Daniel Leuck, SwingLabs, and Ikayzo bring you JIC : the simple multi-resolution cross-platform icon format for Java!

Ok, ok, a little dramatic I know. But hey, it's cool technology and cool technology is what SwingLabs is all about. Daniel Leuck from Ikayzo recently contributed some code to the SwingLabs/JDNC Incubator Project for Java(tm) Icons. Read through the source (it's a quick read), as well as this SwingLabs forums posting.

Essentially, JIC is a zip file that contains a series of png or jpg images. All images are named in a standard manner. From the JavaDoc for JIconFile:

Each image has the name "image_(size).(png|jpg)" where (size) is the image size. All images have square dimensions (same width and height.) Variants such as icons with drop shadows are stored within the archive in a folder named after the variant. For example, an icon variant having a drop shadow with a size of 24 should be stored as "shadow/image_24.png". Variant names are all lowercase by convention.

Bam, that's it. As you can imagine, a lot of cool things can be done with this basic structure. Since JIconFile represents the logical icon rather than the physical icon, we can imagine cool utilities for getting grayscaled images (for disabled icons, of course), accessible (large) images, images with badges, etc.

Oh, and by the way, I can't help but plug the awesome icons over at IconExperience. I'm sure these icons (with all their wonderful variations) motivated JIconFile in the first place.

Cool stuff, keep it comin'

Richard

Deployment

A new sub project has been added to SwingLabs today, http://deployment.dev.java.net. A few weeks ago Erik Vickroy approached me about starting a project related to deployment issues for rich client Swing applications. After a little brainstorming, it became clear that such a project would be a great addition to the SwingLabs suite of projects. Indeed, easing the deployment of rich client apps is an extremely important aspect of improving Swing developers' productivity.

We're looking forward to continued collaboration between the Deployment and Swing teams here at Sun and the Java developer community!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.