Extensions and Deserialisation

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When loading classes as extensions in a NetBeans Platform application, serialising the dynamically loaded objects is straight forward. However, deserialising them is not. 🙂 This article assumes that the reader is familiar with extension points. For more information on this topic, read the NetBeans Platform 7.1 Quick Start tutorial, the Lookup API javadocs and Toni … Read more

Tutorial: Not So Global Selection

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Selection management and nodes are two frequently used aspects of the NetBeans Platform. And these aspects have been well documented in tutorials: NetBeans Selection Management Tutorial I—Using a TopComponent’s Lookup NetBeans Selection Management Tutorial II—Using Nodes NetBeans Nodes API Tutorial These tutorials (specifically the second one) deal with explorer views that are located on top … Read more

Ode to Project Groups

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Observing developers at work in the NetBeans IDE, I have noticed that the project groups feature is perhaps not as well known as one might expect. Despite being listed as one of the Base IDE features. 🙂 Quickly opening up a set of related projects is a very useful feature indeed, if you work on … Read more

Building a NetBeans Platform Application from the Command Line

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During an average day working on an Ant-based NetBeans Platform application, a developer would constantly use the project actions such as “Build”, “Clean” and “Test” in the NetBeans IDE. But when the application needs to be built on a build server, a way needs to be found to perform these actions from the command line. … Read more