RichFaces plugin Released for NetBeans 6.1

< Seam PDF Rendering

Last week Geertjan Wielanga released a plugin he’d been working on for RichFaces tag support in NetBeans. I gave it a shot and its not bad.

Its meant to provide tag support as well as drag and drop of RichFaces controls on the palette. Interestingly this support is meant for both jsps and facelets. But seriously speaking, how many people are using RichFaces on jsps instead of on Facelets? Since this plugin only works with NetBeans 6.1 and the facelets support plugin does not work with 6.1, I really wonder what use it is to me and to a significant number of others.

This is really causing me to worry for Sun. Anyone doing anything new in JSF is not going with JSPs if they really know what is best for them, but rather with Facelets. If Sun really wants JSF to catch up (alongside using NetBeans as their preferred JSF development tool) then they should provide us developers with at least some of what JBoss Tools provides – visual editing. I’ve been waiting for Sun’s Visual JSF to now support Facelets, cos there’s no way I’m sticking with Rave. I think a lot of people share this sentiment and it is the reason why everyone is praising Seam for the good work its doing.

If Sun has seen it fit to bring Jacob Hookom onto the JSF 2 EG as a sign of respect for what Facelets stands for, then it should stop sitting on the sidewalk with Facelets support in NetBeans and get some decent support for it (and I mean not just tag support). Most of us NetBeans fans are in a love hate relationship with it because of such political (in)decisions. Sun should continue taking developers seriously and see how to improve on it’s technologies with already proven ones instead of trying to stuff things down our throats that we don’t want to swallow.

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28th May 2008

Ah. I just came across a release of the Facelets support for NetBeans 6.0 rebuilt to work with NetBeans 6.1. Good job by http://ifnu.artivisi.com. Here is the download. And thanks to Po-Ting Wu for the rebuild instructions.

Thanks also to Geertjan for the work on Richfaces support. JSF development will get better and easier!

Fedora 8 and NetBeans Problems

Last month i got a hold of Fedora 8 and upgraded my 7 installation. I’d heard about the IcedTea version of the JDK already installed in Fedora, so I decided to go ahead and install without updating to JDK 6. Much to my surprise, NetBeans won’t install with the following error

‘Assertion ‘c->xlib.lock’ failed.’ error.

and a lot more.

Changing to JDK 6 didn’t help either. NetBeans is the IDE, and not being able to use it outta the box just drove me nuts. In a hurry to use my system, i just re-installed Fedora 7 and went back to life as usual.

However, to all the folks who had also tried to install NetBeans 6 on Fedora, here is the solution to a problem that turns out to be from the JDK itself.

For sun-java5-bin:
sed -i ’s/XINERAMA/FAKEEXTN/g’ /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.11/jre/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so

For sun-java6-bin:
sed -i ’s/XINERAMA/FAKEEXTN/g’ /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.00/jre/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so

Got it from here

Also for those of us who want NetBeans to work alongside the XGL destop effects, here’s the workaround

put into the script file of NetBeans this line: export AWT_TOOLKIT=MToolkit

Here’s the source

Now let the Fedora 8 games begin