A bit about the NetBeans Platform

“The NetBeans Platform is a generic framework for Swing applications. It provides the “plumbing” that, before, every developer had to write themselves—saving state, connecting actions to menu items, toolbar items and keyboard shortcuts; window management, and so on. The NetBeans Platform provides all of these out of the box. You don’t need . . . → Read More: Book Review: NetBeans Platform 6.9 Developers Guide]]> NetBeans has been my IDE of choice for the past few years and to my pleasure, I recently received a copy of NetBeans Platform 6.9 Developers Guide from Packt. So, I thought of coming out with a review of this book.

A bit about the NetBeans Platform

“The NetBeans Platform is a generic framework for Swing applications. It provides the “plumbing” that, before, every developer had to write themselves—saving state, connecting actions to menu items, toolbar items and keyboard shortcuts; window management, and so on. The NetBeans Platform provides all of these out of the box. You don’t need to manually code these or other basic features, yourself, anymore.” – from the NetBeans Platform site.

And from Boeing to governments, lot of applications are being built on top of the NetBeans platform.

Do I need a technical book to learn about the NetBeans Platform?

Though the NetBeans Platform has a rich set of online documentation, readers’ taste can differ and books are great at delivering the right content to the right audience.

Some might prefer a book to get started with a particular topic, some might want to read a book with in-depth technical content.

And it’s great to see more and more books are targeted at the NetBeans Platform.

Who can benefit from this book?

Are you planning to develop any desktop application? Why not develop your application on top of the NetBeans Platform, which gives you a lot of must have features in every desktop application? Why re-invent the wheel?

Even if you have an existing desktop application, it’s a great idea to port it to NetBeans Platform. Just remember the “DRY” (Don’t repeat yourself) principle.

Do you use the NetBeans IDE to create web or mobile applications but miss your favourite feature in the IDE? Why not write some plugins yourself?

What ever may be your case, this book can give you a good start at NetBeans Platform.

What’s so special about this book?

As I started reading a couple of chapters, I got impressed with the way the content is delivered.

The book starts with the traditional “Hello World” module and takes the reader to the advanced topics in an elegant and seamless manner.
The author makes good use of screenshots which will help the beginners a lot.

Like many other popular titles, this book takes an application (in this case, a Task Manager) and attempts to build it through every chapter.
This undoubtedly will help the readers master the platform concepts quickly.

Right from the basic form components, the book covers virtually every aspect of the NetBeans Platform like the Window System, Data System, Branding etc.
There’s even an chapter to help you create installers for your application.

The most noticeable feature I found in this book is the friendly language and the clear explanation of topics having beginners in mind.
I haven’t finished reading all the chapters yet, but I hope to complete it shortly. My objective is to write a couple of plugins for the NetBeans IDE and I hope this book will help me achieve that pretty quickly.

You can get this book from Packt and Amazon.

But I just wondered, how to implement that in a swing application? (Sorry, i haven’t learn swing application framework yet)

Consider this typical scenario: A user has logged into the swing application and has opened some 2 or three windows (JFrames). Now the user goes somewhere leaving the system idle. How can we logout the user . . . → Read More: Implementing session timeout in swing apps]]> If you are working in a web based project, the term “session” must be a frequently used one. “I want to implement a HttpSessionListener”, “How do I access http session?”, “Should i store my user state in http session or in a session bean?”.

But I just wondered, how to implement that in a swing application? (Sorry, i haven’t learn swing application framework yet)

Consider this typical scenario:
A user has logged into the swing application and has opened some 2 or three windows (JFrames). Now the user goes somewhere leaving the system idle.
How can we logout the user automatically here (for security reasons)?
How to close the opened resources?

I initially thought of writing a global event listener and implementing that in all the user interface classes. But that looked like a bad idea for me, because that would involve a lot of code changes.

So I searched through the net and found out a solution from a java forum (thanks camickr).
In contrast to my expectations, it was quite simple though. And here it is:

private void trackSystemEvents()
{
Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().addAWTEventListener(new AWTEventListener()
{
public void eventDispatched(AWTEvent event)
{
String eventText = event.toString();
if(eventText.indexOf(“PRESSED”) != -1 || eventText.indexOf(“RELEASED”) != -1)
{
SessionMonitor.getInstance().setLastActionTime(System.currentTimeMillis());
}
}
}, AWTEvent.MOUSE_EVENT_MASK + AWTEvent.KEY_EVENT_MASK);
}

Here, i want to track the user activity through a “global” listener kind of thing. And here the event listener is registered with AWTEvent.MOUSE_EVENT_MASK and AWTEvent.KEY_EVENT_MASK. That means, only mouse events and key events shall be tracked.

And i don’t want to track the mouse moved/entered events and that’s why the small “if” condition which checks only for “pressed/released” actions like key pressed, mouse released etc.

This will help you in implementing the logic to track session timeout.

And spice it up with “observer” pattern to notify your user interfaces to close the opened resources.