Friday 11 December 2009

Netbeans 6.8 Released

Its arrived, its fixed, its fast, its good, get it here, only had one problem Glassfish v3 wouldn't run because of a port conflict, that was my problem, everything else just works fine.

Best netbeans version yet.....

Please can we have Apache Geronimo support too

Wednesday 9 December 2009

netbeans 6.8 RC2

I have been using netbeans 6.8 RC2 for a couple of days for web development  doing my day job and it is looking good. (Java5 SE web, DWR and ExtJS)

Starts up much faster and is seems generally much more responsive all round.

The only problem encountered so far is that the editor windows do not maximize/restore which is already in the netbeans bug list, other than that I reckon it is ready to ship.

Monday 7 December 2009

Netbeans 6.8 RC's

netbeans 6.8 RC2 is out and much improved in terms of performance over 6.8 beta and 6.7.1.

I am using RC2 for my web app development, its early days but looking really good this time. Will post more when I have had time to use it more this week.

Still no Apache Geronimo support though, shame.

RC1 wasnt much use to me, I tried it on a couple of different machines and could not get web apps to deploy due to missing dependancy issues out of the box, this is fixed in RC2.

Saturday 19 September 2009

Checking Javascript Files With JSLINT in Netbeans

Enough about minifying JavaScript, what about checking JS files with JSLint too.

Try this in NetBeans:-

Download the latest lib from http://code.google.com/p/jslint4java/ and put in your ant/lib directory or on the class path. I put it in the netbeans project folder in the example.

Override the pre-compile ant target in your netbeans build.xml so that it looks something like the following example, substituting the class path and includes as appropriate:-



When you build your web application the chosen JavaScript files will be run through the JSLint ant task and checked for errors, the build will fail if any problems are found.

This has saved me hours of debugging JavaScript especially when using cross browser JS libs such as EXTJs.


Sunday 19 July 2009

I have come across a brilliant idea for compressing and minifying CSS and Javascript.

Just check this out and forget my previous ramblings on the subject and enjoy :)


Friday 6 March 2009

If you want an online js and css minifyer go here and use ScriptMixer. The guys have wrapped the YUICompressor lib.

The offline version can also combine files whilst minifying and obfuscating js and css files too.

So to use in netbeans builds do this:-
1) Download the offline version from here,
2) Put it in your ant lib directory, windows default for nb 6.5 is 
     C:\Program Files\NetBeans 6.5\java2\ant\lib
3) For js combining, choose an include file name say compressed.js and use this as the include in your html/jsp files.


4) add something like the following to your project build.xml substituting the filename for your own:-

Job done, this has saved the overhead of 3 JS files by combining into one, making them smaller and obfuscating them, all automaticly in the build process.

Works a treat.