BangBits

Why it was made Although NetBeans is capable of suggesting and auto-inserting @SuppressWarnings, it doesn't actually provide code completion or documentation for these values. Indeed, as I've blogged about before , it is tricky to track down the exact enumeration and semantics of these magic values. This is due to the fact that they are entirely dependent on the compiler and IDE. This plugin adds support for the values currently supported by NetBeans 6.1, namely "cast", "deprecation", "divzero", "empty-statement", "empty", "fallthrough", "finally", "serial" and "unchecked". It also tries to explain how and when to use them. How it was made Creating plugins for NetBeans is relatively easy if you start by grabbing existing code and have invested in the RCP book. Especially blogs like Geertjan' s and Sandip's are virtual goldmines. So for this one, I used the Geertjan's blog entr...

In the post from yesterday I was a little harsh regarding the performance of recent NetBeans versions, which seems to have taken a toll for the worse. One of the most annoying things is how much scanning and processing is going on all the time which harms responsiveness and the overall user experience. The NetBeans mailing list yielded responses like "more features requires more work" which is fair enough. However, I decided I wanted to have my cake (speed) and eat it too (features). Memory mapping to the rescue It's not exactly new. So called "RAM drives" have been used for ages to speed things up, some Linux distro's even mount the temporary files location into RAM to improve performance. We can do the same to our source checkouts to gain massive increase in throughput as well as access time. There are two easy ways to archive this out of the (Linux) box, mount a dedicated RAM drive or use the TMPFS filesystem . Sorry, Windows users will have to look els...

NetBeans Pretty Much Unusable If you care about NetBeans and its performance, an interesting development occurred over the last 24h on the nbusers mailinglist. It seems the upcoming 6.5 release sparked a debate claiming that it's pretty much unusable . While I wouldn't go that far, there is actually some truth to the matter as experienced by my colleagues and I. A little bit of history I've been back and forth between various IDE's over the years, coming from Visual Studio (VB/C/C#) I've been rather spoiled in regard to syntax highlighting, code completion and debugging. In fact I remember back in 2001 how I was convinced into doing a college project in Java, primarily because of the assistance offered by Visual Studio J++. At that time, no tool provided these kind of features (although Forte and JBuilder tried). In this day and age, things looks quite different of course. SUN finally realized that it's worth having great tools (some would argue they have to sol...

The very little I've had to paste code into this fairly new blog, was enough to give me the idea of creating an extension to NetBeans which would help to remedy this formatting nightmare. Now, in my world, there's approximately a 100:1 ratio between idea and actual realization, so I'd have to salute the awesome OpenIDE API's for making this possible spending just a few late nights and taking just 200 lines of code. Without further ado, I present, my first NetBeans plugin . Special copy/paste The plugin will add a couple of new actions to the context-sensitive popup-menu of the source editor, which will allow you to copy the selected text as preformatted HTML, as well as a CSS version which will preserve the formatting used in NetBeans. Using the "Copy as HTML and CSS" menu as in the above screen dump will result in you being able to paste it directly into a website/wiki/blog and have it display like this: /** * @param args the command line arguments ...