n_varun's blog

Wiki to XML using Ant

n_varun — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 08:53:49 +0000

Folks,

On July 1st, I started a new blog that will feature posts related to the experiments I carry out at various FOSS projects. Motto for this initiative: "You've got to experiment to figure out what works", as said by Andrew Weil. As part of this initiative, I started a new project as well.

Wiki to XML
Martin Junghans and Dirk Riehle, did research on the possibility of converting WikiCreole Markup to XML format. As a result, they created an EBNF grammar and an XML interchange format (Creole 1.0).

As I was looking for ways to get started with Ant and that too, making use of Freeform projects. I could recall that I had read some research papers, on the subject of converting wiki to xml. Thus, I found a way to write an Ant task for executing the conversion.

You may continue reading more about this over my other blog..

DocWeb | Dynamic Implementation of Javadocs

n_varun — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:24:22 +0000

Welcome to the Javadoc Community, a resource for application developers that is enhanced by the community. You read and use the JavaDoc for your projects as in the past, but now you can also view the Javadoc in any one of a variety of languages. Additionally, you can add translations for some of the languages.

Check out the cool new way of browsing javadocs.. Visit DocWeb!

Fixing bugs in RHN v1.x

n_varun — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:27:44 +0000

Its been a while, since I have blogged here. So, its time to take a look at one of my NetBeans Module and hence, fix some bugs!

Revamped Hyperlink Navigation
Last year, I had written a blog on Hyperlink Navigation Renaissance, hereâ€™s brief overview;

After lot of discussion on OpenIDE mailing lists, exploring Developer FAQâ€™s, exerting my wrist, flexing fingers and what not? Finally, hit the deck hard! Yeah, Hyperlink Navigation in NetBeans got smarter! Especially, for HTML documents.

This is the same module that got published into NetBeans 6.0 Update Center last year. Recently, I have discussed a lot about this module; its history, setting up a Kenai project and finally, how do I make use of SVN to control revisions of this module from Windows CLI and NetBeans IDE.

Annoying Bugs
Well, I thought after a few weeks of refactoring the code, I created last year. It will run smoothly and it did, however I found 2 bugs today. Probably, I should have used some testing strategy to tackle this. Anyways, I have filed them at my Kenai Project's JIRA Issue Tracker.

These bugs actually affect v1.0 and v1.1 of this module. I intend to fix them for v1.2 Please note that RHN v1.x will be compatible with NetBeans 6.0 and probably with NetBeans 6.1. When you would see the number to left of decimal point change, i.e. RHN vN.x where N > 1 and x belongs to [0, M]. For instance, RHN v2.0 would work well with NetBeans 6.1 and may not with NetBeans 6.0.

This is turning out to be a great learning experience for me, I look forward to provide more updates on this. If you want to help in fixing them, you're welcome to join Kenai and hence, join my project.

Latest Updates

Jul 01, 2009
I have successfully resolved one of them, refer my another blog for more details.

Father of Java at Jazoon?

n_varun — Tue, 05 May 2009 13:02:41 +0000

Christian Frei, who is the co-organizer of Jazoon, the international conference on Java technology for software developers, architects, consultants, and IT managers, has setup a poll stating;

Sign up here with your name to convince James Gosling to attend Jazoon!

We will close this list by 31st May, so post this link where ever you can and ask all your friends to sign up.

http://jazoon.doodle.com/g7qfpqqaw4us89at

Thank you,
The Jazoon Team

So, what are you waiting for? Share this link on every social network you have on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc.

Stay tuned for more updates..

GoF and Lookup API

n_varun — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:41:39 +0000

Happy New Year 2009

I am late on wishing you, still I have got some exciting stuff for all..

Dec 24, 2008
I began another blog series, the most interesting one I guess! As part of my university courses, where I was introduced to "Gang of Four" design patterns in recent past. I felt quite excited about them, so lets see whatâ€™s in store for all of usâ€¦

Jan 02, 2009
As per the above announcement on making use of Lookup API along with some design patterns in RCP Apps. So, I thought why not get started by porting some basic code snippets onto NetBeans Platform and then I shall see how to go about evolving them.

I will be beginning with Builder Pattern (a type of Creational Patterns). It does seem obvious with the title of the post- "Building" Pizza with Lookup.

Jan 09, 2009
Continuing from the last post, I will present you the code and pointers to the SVN repository at Project Kenai where the project resides..

Last time, I said I have ported the sample code to NetBeans Platform in the form of 4 modules getting plugged into the NetBeans Platform Application and I named it PizzaBeans. Today, we will just setup the service provider API and its service providersâ€¦

That's all for today, stay tuned for more...

Creating a Project Type

n_varun — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 11:40:08 +0000

Nov 15, 2008
I began a blog series on my learnings of NetBeans APIâ€™s, interacting with experienced folks on the mailing lists and browsing through NetBeans sources, that might help me (possibly others as well) "Create a New Project Type" in NetBeans IDE.

Dec 16, 2008
One month later, I could find some time to document my further learnings, by blogging about "Adding Category and Projects". This was a short post, but has many useful pointers for a beginner like me to learn and understand the integration of Project Types in NetBeans Platform.

Dec 19, 2008
Three days later, I wrote the follow-up blog about "Templates", yes the oneâ€™s shown in "New File" action invoked on any node of a projectâ€™s Logical View (Projects Window).

Next; I will dig deep into the Platform again, its been a month since I have surfed the sourcesâ€¦ By the way, many community members are showing interest in creating a project type, hope to see them documenting their experience soon...

See ya, until next time. Stay tuned to my blog...

Ant, Hudson and Glassfish

n_varun — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:50:04 +0000

Working on a project based on NetBeans Platform, never thought I would discover many new technologies!

Ant-Based Projects, NetBeans Build System

For the past 1 week or so, I am trying to learn how to create a new project type based on the layout I decide. So, thought of going for Ant Based Project Type, asked the mailing lists.

I was pointed to a document, here's an overview- "This guide should give developers of NetBeans modules (extensions) a basic idea of how to write new project types for NetBeans 4.x, as well as use certain important parts of the project and build system functionality from other kinds of modules." Read this document, referred the related javadocs and it was surely going to be time consuming. Still, I kept surfing and interlinking documents, so that everything falls into place & makes sense.

Hudson

Lol, whenever I surf the web for understanding one technology, I found another! This goes for Hudson as well, during my above internet surfing on NetBeans Platform. I found out Hudson too, in an unusual manner. I had just heard the name, never knew what it does?

Recently, I saw Amit's blog and found out, he had reviewed Tom Wheeler's latest article. Although, topic was of no interest to me, I was more interested to know what other articles he has written for Object Computing, Inc.

Then, I found out Tom's article on "Automating Builds Made Easy with Hudson". It seems to be outdated as it was written 2 years back. Still, it had everything to give an introduction to Hudson technology for students like me!Nov 09, 2007

I thought of staying away from it for sometime, so as to focus on the above, i.e. creating Ant Based Project Type. However, it was not to be as on Sunday, I thought of trying out Hudson. Tom, thanks for the article, at least I could get started with it. Since Dec 2006, many changes might have taken place, and it was visible atleast in the Web UI of Hudson, so I downloaded Hudson 1.258 and deployed its ".war" file using Glassfish V2 UR2 (bundled with NetBeans IDE, early this year) and it had one "domain name" by default as "domain1". So, using CLI on Windows XP Professional SP2, I ran the following command-

asadmin start-domain domain1

Every time I had to run this to launch Glassfish server, so as to deploy Hudson and automate builds. So, I created a batch file (runGf.bat), which would run the above command. It might look silly to execute a single command from batch file, but its quite useful to me. Moreover, if there exists many domain names, then I can make the batch file more useful by passing the "domain name" as an argument. Here's the modified contents-

asadmin start-domain %1

It will look like this at Command Prompt;

C:/>runGf domain1

It does make sense, isn't it?

References

Articles
CI with Hudson on Glassfish
http://www.developinjava.com/articles.php?article_id=7

Tom Wheeler (NetBeans Dream Team Member),
Automated Builds Made Easy with Hudson
http://www.ociweb.com/jnb/jnbDec2006.html

Related Links

Arguments handling in a batch file
http://www.rgagnon.com/gp/gp-0009.html

Glassfish Quick Start Guide
https://glassfish.dev.java.net/downloads/quickstart/index.html

Administering Hudson
https://hudson.dev.java.net/admin.html

Hudson and Glassfish
https://hudson.dev.java.net/containers/glassfish.html

NetBeans Innovator Grants Results

n_varun — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:18:07 +0000

Hello all, Its all over the blogosphere yesterday, NetBeans Innovator Grants Results are out. I won't copy paste the whole stuff, as there already many postings in Planet NetBeans about this. So, you can check out the podcasts, announcements related to the results, here's a list for you-

Check out the links for detailed information. Enjoy listening to the winners, and the manager.

Plugin Development Workshop at Amity University

n_varun — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 18:01:17 +0000

In the first week of September, I was called up by Angad Singh, CA Tech Lead, and he told me, that I am invited to conduct a workshop at Amity University, during their hosting of Sun CA Induction Program for 40 new CA's from North India.

NetBeans Plugin Development Workshop

Finally, the day arrived for my first ever workshop, and it got started by Angad, who introduced me to the new CA's, as a NetBeans Dream Team Member and ex- JIIT Sun Club Coordinator. There were nearly 20+ CA's in target audience. Then, I took over and asked them 2 questions-

Why do we create Netbeans plug-in modules?

Why is there Terminology confusion?
- RCP Book- The Benefits of Modular Programming

Followed by 2 exercises, I had planned to do with them.

Lets go inside NetBeans IDE

Now, lets go a bit deeper inside NetBeans IDE

Unfortunately, they had not installed NetBeans 6.5 Beta, instead I was told, the CA's would be using NetBeans 6.0 in the labs. Anyways, the plug-in I had chosen for the workshop was flexible enough, that I could have used 5.5 release for delivering the workshop too!

Lets go inside NetBeans IDE

So, we started developing the plug-in, it took good amount of time, as it took a while for them to adapt to the NetBeans Platform, and when they did, it was a smooth sail afterwards.

After the plug-in was developed, and installed in Target Platform, they found it really amazing thing to have. Then, I told them, that whatever steps we took to develop the plug-in were existent in the IDE because of some plug-in modules.

Now, lets go a bit deeper inside NetBeans IDE

Now, to go a bit deeper, I thought of playing with XML layer. It was indeed a great idea, as they were surprised to see the power of this optional configuration file. As Geertjan once said, "Varun introduces you to the layer.xml file in NetBeans modules. He shows you how a few small tweaks can have very useful results".

Pointers are back again...

We all know, there are nothing like pointers in Java, but XML layer in NetBeans Plugin Development does use it indirectly. The .shadow files, are pointers/symbolic links to the .instance files, which in my case, were used to register Actions in System Filesystem. I explained them what System Filesystem is all about? Just a brief overview, as it was their first real experience with Plugin Development. So, I just wanted to touch every possible aspect, to get them started with development smoothly, rather than explain them FileObjects, DataObjects, etc.

Out-of-the-Box

Finally, the workshop got over. Really, it was an amazing experience barring minor hiccups and while preparing for the workshop, I do believe, I have developed a better understanding of concepts I just talked about. Thank you, Amity and Sun for giving me the opportunity to conduct a workshop.

Related Links
[ Day 1 | Event | Day 2 ]
Photos by Angad Singh, CA Tech Lead
[ Open Office | PDF | Power Point ]

Implementing Dynamic Binding while Coding?

n_varun — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:14:15 +0000

Few weeks back, I had blogged at my other blog, about "Getting your basics right?". I don't know how many of you would agree, however the discussion that took place for filing an RFE, which eventually got filed as Issue #142112, was a long lasting one, and if people had clarity of concepts, then it might not have extended that long.

Anyways, I think you would like to comment on that. Read my blog for more details.

Here's the Usecase, which was sufficient to justify the filing of a RFE.

 6 public class UserImpl implements User {
 7 
 8     public void callCheck() {
 9         callImpl();
10         new UserImpl().callImpl();
11     }
12 
13     public void callImpl() {
14         System.out.println("Implementation Invoked...");
15     }
16 
17     public static void main(String[] args) {
18         new UserImpl().callCheck();
19 
20         // Dynamic Binding...
21         User anonUser = new UserImpl();
22         anonUser.callImpl();
23     }
24 }
25 
26 interface User {
27 
28     public void callImpl();
29 };

Clicking on callImpl() in line #22, doesn't navigate to the implemented version of callImpl(), i.e. line #13. Instead, user is navigated to line #28. So, this should not exist, hence someone filed a RFE.

Thanks for your time!