Tim Boudreau's Blog

Postcards from Brazil

Having all this time in airports and planes has given me a chance to work on the new editor hints plug-in for NetBeans. This module provides unobtrusive features in the editor that let you add casts, implement methods, lots of cool stuff, while staying mostly out of the way. It when my colleague Jan Lahoda and I both wrote plug-ins to do this sort of thing on the same weekend. So we banged the results together, and started getting more contributions from another community member - so other than merge conflicts because we've all been working fast and furious on it, it's coming along swimmingly. We hope to make it available on the update center soon; with this sort of thing once you lose trust, it's gone forever, so we want to make absolutely sure it's generating good code and not offering to do dumb things before making it available. If you're brave and have a checkout of NetBeans, you can find it in contrib/editorhints and contrib/editorhints/java.

As I said, Brazil is lovely - the climate reminds me of visiting my grandparents in Jackson, Mississippi as a boy - but maybe a bit hotter. And I've met a huge number of Java developers who have been wonderful to talk with and work with - the enthusiasm down here is infectious! And fortunately, there are wonderful beverages to cool off with - just bore hole and insert straw:

I also met Dalibor Topic, who works on Kaffe - and he managed to get Kaffe working from NetBeans (they still need to finish implementing Swing, so you can't run NetBeans itself there - but you can install it as a "platform" and use it as the JVM you run/test in if you want).

Comments

• Looking forward to your hints module. BTW, isn't TopComponent deprecated?

  Regards
  Chuk

  Posted by: chukmunnlee on April 14, 2005 at 06:31 PM

• No, you're thinking of TopManager.

  Posted by: timboudreau on April 14, 2005 at 07:55 PM

• Also in the interest of giving credit where credit is due, Honza Lahoda and Leon (omitting last name as I don't know that he wants to be named) did more work than I did on this - my prototype was a hack to prove it could be done; Honza thought harder about it and did the work, I did some polishing of the UI and some API around eventually doing "live template" types of things.

  Interesting now is how to allow a project-type to participate in providing hints: for example, if you're creating a method on an EJB remote interface, maybe something should be generated elsewhere too.

  Posted by: timboudreau on April 14, 2005 at 08:04 PM

• Hi, Tim! Is your stomach ok, after eating that 'lingüiça calabresa'? :D

  I'm definitely using the platform in the first project I'm allowed to (you know, most times it's not our choice...). And after seeing the amazing things you guys are doing, I've come to like the IDE too! I just can't wait for the 4.2 release, to play with those new things (really, I've just spent the last two hours checking out the source ;))

  Ronald Tetsuo Miura - Brasília, Brasil

  Posted by: ronaldtm on April 14, 2005 at 08:47 PM

• I placed info how to build NetBeans with new code completion and editor hints to my blog:

  http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/roumen/20050413#new_code_completion_and_suggestions

  The description of currently available features is also there. Enjoy.

  Posted by: romanstrobl on April 15, 2005 at 05:53 AM

• Will 'local history ' be included in the list of 4.2?

  Posted by: pprun on April 15, 2005 at 06:34 AM

• Hi, Tim. My name is Fábio Alves, a Developer from SERPRO (Brazil, Rio de Janeiro). Excuse my poor English... your presentation was very good. I am "starting" on Java Developer... actualy I have worked with VB and Oracle Forms, but my new personal project is to learn Java.
  Your Brazilian photos are very good too... I will re-visit your blog soon.
  Enjoy Salvador... It is a wonderful city.

  Best regards,
  Fábio Alves (www.fabioalves.com / fabioalves@globo.com / fabio.alves@serpro.gov.br).
  

  Posted by: dudoalves on April 15, 2005 at 07:58 AM

• Hi Tim, patch now checked in into Kaffe's CVS. After picking Kaffe as a runtime, Netbeans picks it up nicely, and lets me build and run code using Kaffe as an underlying runtime. The obligatory screenshot is here.

  cheers,
  daibor topic

  Posted by: robilad on April 17, 2005 at 11:55 AM

• Dalibor, I lost your email address - could you email me?

  Posted by: timboudreau on April 17, 2005 at 11:59 AM

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