2010 September End of Book! Closing chapters review.
After 3 weeks I've ended NetBeans Platform 6.9 Developers Guide Book, and as previous quick summary of read chapters.
Chapter 7: File System
How to access File System of operating system without knowing which system is it. This chapter is mostly about low-level access. But for me it is already pretty good abstraction!
Chapter 8: Data System
Creating additional abstraction on top of objects from previous chapter and create actions to create actions to save data of active model object. This chapter is also about using files in explorer which we all know from using NetBeans itself.
Chapter 9: Dialogs
This is last long chapter (28pages), which comparing to next four (sum 36 pages) is last "big" topic. Dialogs are not only simple notifications but also Wizards! We all know how wizard can make friendly some complex actions, especially when user do know know "Everything" about what and How he or she can do it. The best thing about wizards is that there is already wizard for creating wizards :)
Chapter 10: Settings
This chapter is a real prove that NetBeans is really extendable. This is really easy to create new icon in setting window and store your user settings. Chapter is short, but this is really easy.
Chapter 11: Help
This is something to me that looks like too many boilerplate code, Fortunately wizard will create most of it for us. It's extensible and assigning your custom help for new modules is easy and mostly is done in 3 lines of code to add in module which want to use custom help.
Chapter 12: Branding
Mostly in preferences of NetBeans Platform project you can make your new project lighter by removing unused libraries, and make NetBeans looks not like NetBeans, there is also a central place to edit all message bundles! So even standard texts can be customized.
Chapter 13: Distribution and Update
Last chapter about building final application and assigning to it yous server host as update center if you want to fix some bugs without need of new version of a whole application!
I will start working on book review, it probably will be tomorrow :)
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