stillhacking

It was nice to get back to San Francisco for another JavaOne.  This year did not surprise me in any way with announcements but it did feel like a JavaOne filled with energy and enthusiasm.  I think getting Java 8 out and accepted was the primary reason but there are other significant ones. First off, being a NetBeans fan, I very much appreciated NetBeans day and sessions throughout the conference in which it was mentioned and utilized.  While I have known my way around Eclipse for years (and I have used Intellij), when I tell folks I prefer to use NetBeans I get an occasional strange look or question but that's becoming less so. If you don't know about NetBeans, I suggest downloading and giving it a serious look.  If it's the choice of James Gosling and guys who write code for NASA, how can you not check it out?   Geertjan Wielenga, the guy I consider the face of NetBeans, was very visible at JavaOne/NetBeans Day this year (as were quite a few others from t...

Thinking about it earlier today, I have been using NetBeans before (or after actually) it was called NetBeans.  I say after, because I remember using Forte but it was called NetBeans before and after Forte.  To put that into some perspective, some years ago I was at a JavaOne (2002?) at a Meet the Forte Tools Experts session.  NetBeans has come along way since those days but I recall seeing a lot of promise which has been a reality for a long time now. The first thing I liked, and still like, about NetBeans was that it has a familiar look.  This may be because I was a long time Delphi and JBuilder user, both Borland IDEs, and NetBeans was, at least to some extent, inspired by Delphi's IDE style and functionality.  NetBeans feels natural to me and I think it is generally very approachable for new developers. Out-of-the-box functionality is my second reason for liking NetBeans.  I install the full version of NetBeans on OS X, Linux, and Windows and I am ...

Recently I had the need to remove one project from my recent projects list in NetBeans.  The problem was I had opened a very large project which was causing the    I found a few references to where one might find the file which contains the recent project list for older versions of NetBeans but they seemed to be a little dated.   The file I wanted to find and edit is called projectui.properties I happen to be on a Mac so that file could be found here: ~//Library/Application Support/NetBeans/7.4/config/Preferences/org/netbeans/modules I opened the file with a text editor and looked for the project name in the openProjectsDisplayNames entries.  Each of the entries include a dot followed by a number at the end to make them unique.  Once I found it, I noted the number and deleted that line.   Next I removed the corresponding entries in the openProjectsIcons and openProjectsURLs sections as well. I have a cou...

It's pretty cool that JDeveloper is now a NetBeans platform app .  Wanting to give it a quick look on OS X I downloaded the Java edition generic installation. Unfortunately after unzipping it and placing it in Applications, it would not launch. Trying from the command line using this command open -n ./JDeveloper.app gave me a error: LSOpenURLsWithRole() failed with error -10810 for the file /Applications/jdeveloper/JDeveloper.app. Given past history trying to get JDeveloper going on OS X I thought I might try the JAVA_HOME environment variable first. First I checked which versions are available with this command: /usr/libexec/java_home -V this was the output: Matching Java Virtual Machines (5):     1.7.0_25, x86_64: "Java SE 7" /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_25.jdk/Contents/Home     1.7.0_21, x86_64: "Java SE 7" /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_21.jdk/Contents/Home     1.7.0_17, x86_64: "Java SE 7" /Li...

A particular Java application I co-developed leverages both SOAP/WSDL and REST web services.  We use maven to manage the build process of this application which has been in production for a few years now.  It's been around long enough to have moved from Java 5 to Java 6 and now Java 7 (with limited testing using Java 8).  We have also had the experience of initially including JAXB jar files with our application and dealing with the "endorsed" directory because JAXB versions were a bit of a moving target for a while. Now that JAXB is neatly included with Java as it should be so we no longer include it.  I thought all of this was behind us (and unfortunately somewhat forgotten) until recently when we added Jersey 1.17 to the application to call some newer REST services. When trying to connect to the server, my stack trace included this: Caused by: java.lang.ClassCastException: com.sun.xml.bind.v2.runtime.JAXBContextImpl cannot be cast to com.sun.xml.internal.bin...

So where's binding in Java at? Don't 'ya just hate that? I'm not sure if using bad grammer even makes a point anymore because so many of us don't recognize even obvious butchering of our language (not that I couldn't benefit from a refersher at this point in my life). I guess I could have said "what's up with binding in Java these days?" Lately I have been doing my Java programming in Eclipse and NetBeans after loving and using JBuilder just about since it was released (although I have heard I won't be able to do without the Eclipse-based JBuilder which I can never remember is code-named Peleton). I understand that NetBeans 6.0 will have binding but I'm not sure what that will look like and after attending Java One and reading about binding, I think I'm clueless. If you're doing some type of binding now and you're not using the stuff from SwingLabs (assuming you can still find it) or JGoodies , I'd like to know what...