2011. május 3., kedd

Outlook style JTreeTable in Swing/Netbeans

The Tasks window of Netbeans provides a very nice, categorized view of tasks in the IDE.

The lines, marking the category headers, are greyed-out in order to provide a strong separation between the tasks of different categories.

The task list looks like the task list of Microsoft Outlook, which I think is one of the the best implementations of tree-style grids (categorized list with multiple columns).

For a long while, I believed that this view is based on JTreeTable and it will be very easy to create similar, nice looking categorized list in Swing/Netbeans.

Recently, I managed to take a look at the source-code and it very much seems that the Tasks view is built with a heavily customized JTable. It's a pity because this cries out loud for being implemented with JTreeTable.

I am wondering how easy it would be to implement a similarly good looking categorized list with Outline (the official Netbeans component for Tree Table style components).

2011. április 20., szerda

Liquibase support for Netbeans

Liquibase is a powerful, database schema-change management tool. Unfortunately, it doesn't have official Netbeans IDE support from neither the Netbeans team nor Liquibase.

Liquorice is a Netbeans plugin for integrating Liquibase into the Netbeans IDE and Netbeans platform applications.

The currently released, 0.2 version implements rudimentary support and concentrates on the most needed functionality.

Features:

  • Database connections stored in the Database Explorer plugin, so
    the developer doesn't have to separately maintain the registry of
    connections.
  • Executing a changeset by simply selecting it in the File or
    Project explorer windows and call the execution from a context menu
    action. The database connection can be selected during the execution.
  • A formatted log is displayed in the Output Window about the
    execution of the changeset, so the developer is properly informed if
    the changeset execution has failed.
  • Custom icon for the Liquibase changeset files, so they can better
    distinguished from the ordinary files.
The plugin can be downloaded from here:
http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/38564/liquorice-core

The plugin is based on the Liquibase and Database Explorer plugins so make sure you also install those (DB Explorer may be already installed since it is a base IDE plugin).