J. O'Conner

You might want to go directly over the the JavaFX website to download the JavaFX SDK, but if you work in NetBeans 6.5 you don’t have to bother. JavaFX 1.0 is available to NetBeans 6.5 users with only a few mouse clicks. Seriously, only a few mouse clicks will get the JavaFX SDK plugin for you and integrate it directly into your NetBeans 6.5 IDE. Here’s how:

1. Select Tools->Plugins from your NetBeans 6.5 menu.
2. Select the Available Plugins tab.
3. Click on the Reload Catalog button just to make sure you have a fresh copy of all available plugins
4. Scroll down the plugin list to find the JavaFX 1.0 plugin, and click on its check box. You can also select a JavaFX debugger and several demos in the same area of the plugin list!
5. Click the Install button
6. Continue working until the download is finished and restart NetBeans IDE

That’s it. Now NetBeans 6.5 has the JavaFX 1.0 SDK integrated directly. You should notice a new JavaFX Project type available to you when you select File->New Project

Sorry for the short post, but I have to get back to my NetBeans IDE and JavaFX. I’ll be back later with more information about my initial overview of the SDK, the language, and much more!

Several months ago, I submitted a bug against NetBeans 6.1. Sure, I expected someone to see the bug, but I didn’t expect the real and substantial interactions that followed.

After logging the bug, I received an email thanking me for my submission. A couple days later, when a NetBeans engineer was able to evaluate the problem, I received another email…this time with comments and even questions just for me. I responded. The NetBeans team responded and made comments on the bug report. The team engaged me, asked questions, and took my feedback seriously.

What an amazing experience! I was impressed by the team’s commitment to engage with its community, to interact directly with an individual.

Just yesterday, I received another email…this time to let me know that the bug fix is in NetBeans 6.5. The NetBeans community didn’t forget about me. I guess someone figured that I’d want to know the status of a bug…especially since I took the time to report it in the first place. They were right; I was interested.

I’ve always known that I’m a NetBeans user, but I would never have gone so far as to call myself a community member. I feel differently after this experience though. I’m glad to be part of the NetBeans community. If you use NetBeans, you’re part of the community too!

As a community member, exercise your rights to be influential in shaping NetBeans. You use NetBeans. Now do something to shape it and to improve it.

How can you get more involved in the NetBeans community? Here are some ideas:

• Write about your NetBeans experiences and share with others. Post your NetBeans knowledge in a blog!
• Create a plugin. I can’t think of a better way to learn how NetBeans is organized and designed.
• Help write documentation
• Join a mailing list or forum. Ask a question. Answer a question
• Attend a NetBeans community event
• or…submit a bug report!

Getting involved is easy, and there are dozens of ways to participate in this thing we call the NetBeans Community. Pick one of these suggestions, or find your own way to contribute. It’s really pretty simple to get involved.

Jersey is the reference implementation of JSR 311, the specification for creating RESTful web services on the Java platform. NetBeans 6.1, the existing, current version of NetBeans, contains a copy of the Jersey library, but it may be outdated now. Recently, the Jersey implementation reached version 1.0, and NetBeans 6.1 contains a copy of an earlier 0.8 release.

If you’re already using the NetBeans 6.5 release candidate, you also have the Jersey 1.0 library. The truth is, however, that we can’t all adopt pre-release, beta software. If you fall into the latter group and need to continue using NetBeans 6.1, you may want to update your Jersey library to get the final, 1.0 version. In this blog entry, I’ll show you how to update your Jersey libraries in NetBeans 6.1.

Download the latest, stable release of the Jersey implementation. I don’t particularly like the way that the library is provided. The download page requires that you analyze your needs first, and you must select the set of jar files you need. This is difficult for the beginning Jersey user. I suggest an all-in-one download — perhaps a zip file — that provides EVERYTHING a beginning Jersey user might need. I’ll lead you through this for now, but you must understand that your real needs may actually differ from what I suggest as a basic set of starter files. Again, you need to read the download page to understand the full set of libraries and their dependencies.

In my opinion, a beginning user needs the following files to create a Jersey enabled, REST service:

• jersey-bundle.jar
• jsr311-api.jar
• asm.jar
• Jersey javadoc

Put this files together in a library directory. Put them anywhere. For this example, I’ve put them in c:\bin\jersey. From now on, I’ll refer to your directory of Jersey files as JERSEY_HOME.

Create the Jersey_1.0 library in NetBeans. Open NetBeans 6.1 and select Tools->Libraries. You should see a dialog like this:

Select the New Library… option at the bottom of the dialog. You’ll see a prompt for the new libary’s name. Let’s call it Jersey_1.0

Add Jersey jar files to the Jersey_1.0 library. Do this by selecting the Add JAR/folder… button in the Library Manager for the new libary you’ve just created. Navigate to your JERSEY_HOME directory and add each jar file to the library.

Add the Jersey library to your project. Now you have the updated Jersey 1.0 jar files. They are available to your applications when you add your new library to your application project. Right-click on your project in the project view, select Properties. Then select the Libraries option in the Project Properties dialog. Now you can select the Add Library… option on the right side.

Find your Jersey_1.0 library in the available libraries list. Now you’ve got it! You have the updated Jersey 1.0 libraries in your Netbeans application project.

I reported that NetBeans 6.1′s project charset encoding feature would allow an unsuspecting user to destroy file data. That’s still true…through no fault of NetBeans really. It’s just a matter of fact — if you start out with UTF-8 and convert your project files to ASCII or ISO-8859-1 or any other subset of Unicode, you will lose any characters that are not also in the target charset.

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