David R. Heffelfinger

For the past few months I've been working with a new client that does not allowed personal hardware to be plugged into their network. They provide the hardware for their consultants and employees to use.

The only computer they had available for me was a laptop with great specs (five years ago), 1 GB of RAM, and a 1.6 Gz (single core, but I think it goes without saying) processor.

On this laptop I've had to run NetBeans, alongside with JBoss or GlassFish (one of the projects I'm working on uses JBoss another one uses GlassFish).

I've always had the fortune of having access to fairly modern hardware, and although I had heard complaints about NetBeans performance, it was always good on the hardware I had available. This situation gave me an opportunity to use NetBeans in, let's just say, "less than ideal" hardware.

What I have noticed is that NetBeans takes a very long time to initialize, but once it does, it works fine, for the most part. The most noticeable annoyance I have seen is that opening files via the "SHIFT+ALT+O" shortcut is slow, many times I finish typing the file name before the list to pick from pops up.

Even with substandard hardware, for the most part I've found that NetBeans performs fairly well.

A couple of days ago I noticed that the NetBeans IceFaces plugin had been updated. I wrote my initial impressions about the plugin a while back.

I've been wanting to take the updated version for a spin, but other commitments have been preventing me from trying it out. Today I had a few minutes to spare so I gave it a try.

I am happy to report that most of the issues I found with the plugin are now fixed.

Pages developed with the plugin now work with GlassFish 3 effortlessly.

Additionally, I can drop components into the navigator view to avoid the CSS absolute positioning that happens when dropping components directly in the page, please note that I only tried this under Linux, which wasn't broken to start with; in my previous test I used both a Windows and a Linux box, and only under Windows I wasn't able to drop components in the navigator.

I was also very glad to be able to change the default package where the automatically generated JSF managed beans get created, it was awful having all of these classes in a package named "WebApplication5" or something along those lines before.

There are a couple of issues that still persist.

The "label" attribute of IceFaces components is still ignored. The weird thing is, it works fine when using Facelets (without visual editing, of course) why doesn't it work with JSPs with Visual Web is anyone's guess. When JSF 1.2 came out, I was so glad that we had an easy way to display user friendly error messages, it has been frustrating not to be able to easily use this feature, first with Woodstock and now with IceFaces

Another issue that is still present is that ctrl+shift dragging from a label or message component into an input component does not yet set the "for" attribute like it was possible with Woodstock. The mouse pointer changes into a crosshair when doing this, also the target component is highlighted when hovering over it, therefore I believe this issue is a bug and not an omission of the feature.

It looks like the folks at IceFaces are making some progress getting this plugin up to speed. Hopefully in the near future the remaining issues will be addressed.