![]() Users can reposition, resize, open or close these windows, and the platform retains the state and position of each the next time the application is launched. ![]() The platform handles managing "windows," which are simply top-level panels within the larger NetBeans frame. You can also override the existing labels and graphics and apply a new look-and-feel such as JGoodies Looks to further customize your application. ![]() The platform allows you to add, delete and change menus, toolbars or keyboard shortcuts through an XML file called a layer file distributed with your application. You can reuse modules provided by others, and the NetBeans platforms can handle versioning and dependency management. As I'll soon explain, it's easy to add new modules into your application's main build, and you can create different builds of your application that contain different sets of modules. Modules can be installed or updated from a special type of ZIP file called an NBM either locally or over the network. You can create your application now and add new features later, without having to redistribute your entire application. Even though the compressed binary package is about four megabytes, it offers an impressive set of features: The NetBeans platform represents an extremely minimal set of components from the IDE. A page on the NetBeans Web site lists a few applications that have been created on the platform, but the mailing lists show that many more people are using it to create applications for internal use. They saw that parts of it could be factored out into a "generic" desktop application that could be extended to create other applications, and the NetBeans Platform was born. Isn't code reuse supposed to be one of the ideals of object-oriented development?Ī few years ago, the NetBeans developers realized that the IDE represented an incredibly sophisticated Java application (though arguably performance was lacking at the time, I assure you that it is now much improved). Though each implementation is remarkably similar, these features are often rewritten from scratch for each project. More complex applications may have required a "plugin" architecture in which components could locate and use services provided by other components, an approach that can quickly become complex when you try manage compile-time and run-time dependencies between modules. They probably had at least some facilities for window management, online help and file editing. ![]() Think about the last few desktop applications you've created. Version 5.0 of NetBeans IDE will include improved support for creating applications on the NetBeans platform. This article describes how to create a simple application using version 4.1 of NetBeans platform. The browser will be able to display PNG, JPEG and GIF image files and you can use any IDE - or even none at all - to create it. By the end of this article you'll be able to use existing components to construct a file browser capable of copying, deleting and renaming files as well editing any text-based file. Ironically, the two most recent production versions of the NetBeans IDE don't even offer support for creating platform modules, though the latest development release does. You don't have to use the NetBeans IDE to benefit from the platform, in fact I generally use Eclipse. Next month, I'll follow up with another article that describes how to create a custom application using your own code. This article introduces the NetBeans platform and shows you how you can get started by reusing existing components. This will allow you to spend more time on the business logic and less time on the infrastructure development common to any GUI application. Instead, I'll explain how to get a head start towards creating desktop applications by reusing the infrastructure on which the IDE itself is built. I want to be clear from the beginning: this is not an article about how to use the IDE. When developers think of NetBeans, they typically think of the popular open-source IDE. Getting Started with the NetBeans Platformīy Tom Wheeler, OCI Senior Software Engineer Getting Started with the NetBeans Platform.
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