Tuesday, April 24, 2012

NetBeans for GUI

My original idea was that using Eclipse to develop GUI. But I found it was not visualized when I was coding. It was hard to tell what the GUI looks like unless I start debug. But this process was so complex, repeated and annoying. Wenhao suggested me to try NetBeans.

I did some research on NetBeans. I will put some materials in this blog, in case I need them later.

NetBeans is a not only a IDE but also a platform framework for Java. It is very powerful for develop Java desktop applications. I can simply drag buttons, boxes or anything else I want in GUI to the working station, and the NetBeans will create the code for me. This is much easier than dealing with code directly, because in NetBeans, what you see is what you get.

NetBeans does not only support Java, but also support JavaScript, PHP, C, C++ and other languages. When I installed the NetBeans, it let me choose if I wanted GlassFish. Since GlassFish might be useful when we connect database, I allow the NetBeans installed and configured GlassFish for me. This was very convenient.

I downloaded NetBeans from here. I chose Java EE version, since I need Java EE and GlassFish, but not other languages. The installation process was quit simple. Then I chose some plug-in.


NetBeans API Documentation - Includes a complete copy of the NetBeans API documentation for offline browsing and Javadoc index searching. Covers all of the official API modules plus some APIs considered under development.

JUnit - Includes the JUnit unit testing library and corresponding library definitions. 3.x and 4.x versions are both included.  

Web Preview -  Web Preview module allows to directly preview HTML pages inside IDE using Embedded Mozilla browser. Also when editing CSS files user can preview any selected HTML page that includes the CSS file.

CSS Preview by Flying Saucer Renderer - Previews CSS documents using the Flying Saucer XHTML rendered    

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