Netbeans for the Coffee Drinker

Well it’s been a few days since I defected from the dictatorship of Windows Vista to Ubuntu – I do have to confess going back into Windows once. But that was just to get a document – I’ve not configured openoffice to read Office 2007 docs.

My Ubuntu now looks like a Mac, I have always loved those “scrolly bar at the bottom” thing that macs have. and I was delighted to find not one but TWO of them for Ubuntu.

Everything works faultlessly. Including a printer we have at work which would not install under Windows Vista without crashing the spooler whenever you went to Print. Not only did Ubuntu find the  printer, it correctly identified it, installed the driver and worked out of the box. Actually much better than windows Vista did.

There seems to be an interesting passion amongst Ubuntu users. There’s a strange feeling you’ve just got your computer back. All my apps are still running about 5 or 6 times faster than under windows. Partly because Ubuntu is running in 64 bit on here – and unlike Windows still runs all the 32 bit apps like Second Life seamlessly.

I’m feeling slightly silly though because I was working with Ubuntu 6.10 over a year ago – it was fine but you had to be a programmer to use it. Now I reckon it’s an IDEAL platform for anyone – especially with  the ability to change it to look how YOU want and not be dictated by the OS.

What was strange was when I went on to the Canal World IRC I use a lot to find I wasn’t the only one who has been redeemed.

Freedom is a nice feeling.

I made a radical decision with my team today.

I used to live on UBUNTU and only use Windows for things that wouldnt work under Ubuntu.

Recently my latest new developer was singing Ubuntu’s praises so I thought I’d go back for a revisit.

Netbeans runs in Ubuntu about 50 times faster than Windows. My machine under ubuntu has got a new lease of life.

- The graphics are astounding – I installed the compiz package.
- We used some sort of install that ran under windoze and creates a host folder with all my windows stuff. – This meant I could just load up and work on the netbeans projects from my windows directory.
- The install of ubuntu including all the setting up only took a couple of hours, most of the stuff was installed automatically.
- I had problems with VPN’s not connecting but that was quickly fixed

I can’t see myself returning to Windows any time soon, I simply don’t see the point.

I have got all the developers moving to Ubuntu now as it is simply better than Windows for development of java apps.

NEW RELEASE CANDIDATE

You may have remembered that I wrote about Icefaces tabset not working in NetBeans.. A new release is out (Release Candidate).

USING COMPONENTS ON A LAYOUT PANEL AND BEING ABLE TO LAY THEM OUT!

Well the goodnews is that you can now see components you drag and drop on to the tab set or layout panel.

However laying out is nigh on impossible. That was until I realised that when you drag and drop components to the page or a layout box of any  type, icefaces (or visual web) doesn’t assign a style to it – this may be by design, but by setting the components style to

position:absolute

I am then able to move and position them around the screen.

THE TABSET COMPONENT

However, the tabset itself is more complicated.

The tabset is made up of  TABS (which are some form of layout), with PANELLAYOUTS as a child under each tab. The panellayout, don’t ask me why is set to inherit it’s position from the parent and this seems to drive it crazy.

To make it so you can layout components on the tabset:-

In the style to the panellayout style

height: 500px; left: 12px; top: 35px; position: absolute; width: 800px

You’ll notice that the tab immediately shrinks in size to just the top – don’t worry about that – it will still work.

Now each component use the above “trick” of setting the style of the components to position:absolute and you are done.

I don’t beleive it.

Finally we get our selves migrated all the way to netbeans 6.5 and then we discover that the icefaces plugins which don’t work with 6.1 don’t work properly with 6.5.

The problem is that if you use any of the panels Like the tab control you drop controls on the tab and they just dissappear.

We *ARE* considering buying Icefaces support but actually I think they need to get it working first, I mean you wouldn’t buy a car if only half of it worked would you?