Quaqua, OS X Application Bundle - Maven - Netbeans 6.1
To skip the introduction and scroll straight to the tutorial, click here.
I’m currently developing a program to make the lives of people who maintain large RapidWeaver projects easier. As I don’t know Objective C, I am developing this program in Java. Before I started work on this project my only Java GUI development experiences were in Linux, during a University programming paper. The main focus of the paper was “Object Orientated Program Design” - the programs we had to make weren’t supposed to be pretty, merely functional. We used Eclipse - use of “cheat” interface builders like Netbeans would have resulted in a fail grade. I found manually coding the GUI of my programs to be a real chore. I decided to use the new Netbeans 6.1 to create my RapidWeaver helper program for this reason.
I want my program to look as “native Mac OS X” as possible, as the intended end-users will all be working in Mac OS X.
Now that I’ve finally managed to get my program to look like a native OS X program, I thought I’d share the process with the Internet.
To achieve my desired look & feel for both my personal project and the example created for the tutorial I used the following tools:
Netbeans 6.1
Maven Plugin
The OS X Application Bundle Plugin
Quaqua Library
Netbeans is a multi-language IDE, predominantly used for Java programming. It has a visual form editor which I find intuitive and easy to use.
The code editor is excellent. For the past two years I have been using Eclipse, and have found Netbeans provides many of the same features that I would expect from a mature IDE.
You can learn more about it, and get it from here: Netbeans 6.1.
The Netbeans Maven Plugin (Mevenide2) is a project management tool. Its features are too many to mention here. You want, no, need this plugin.
It is installed via the Netbeans > Tools > Plugins menu.
This plugin is part of the Mojo Project at Codehaus. To quote the creators, this plugin allows one to: “Package dependencies as an Application Bundle for Mac OS X.”
You can find out more about this Maven plugin here: OS X Application Bundle Plugin
To quote from the Quaqua homepage:
“The Quaqua Look and Feel (Quaqua) is a user interface library for Java applications which wish to closely adhere to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines for Mac OS X.”
You may obtain Quaqua and learn more about it here: Quaqua Library.
All of the above products are of extremely high quality, and provide Java developers with the tools we need to create Mac OS X applications with such convincing appearance and behaviour that they would fool Mr. Jobs himself.
Tutorial
1) Download, install and run Netbeans 6.1.
2) Install the Maven plugin: To do this, select Tools > Plugins from the Netbeans menu. Within the window that opens, select “Available Plugins”. Type “Maven” in the Search box, which should remove the other plugins from the catalogue, leaving you with “Maven” and “Netbeans Maven Hints”. Check the box next to both of these then press “Install”. Follow any instructions that appear.
3) Create a new Netbeans Maven project: Select “File > New Project” from the Netbeans menu. Within the window that appears, select “Maven”. Select “Maven Project”, press “Next”. Select “Maven Quickstart Archetype”, press “Next”. Enter some meaningful information in the fields, then press “Finish”.
You should now have a new Netbeans Maven project. Mine looks like this:
4) Setup and configure the Maven “OS X Application Bundle Plugin”: Expand the “Project Files” node and double click on the “pom.xml” file, which opens it for editing. You will need to add the following to your pom.xml file (between the
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>osxappbundle-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.0-alpha-2-SNAPSHOT</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<configuration>
<mainClass>com.pagesofinterest.quaqua_maven_netbeans.NewJFrame</mainClass>
<bundleName>Quaqua Maven Netbeans</bundleName>
<additionalClasspath>
<path>/System/Library/Java/</path>
</additionalClasspath>
<vmOptions>-Dcom.apple.macos.useScreenMenuBar=true</vmOptions>
</configuration>
<phase>package</phase>
<goals>
<goal>bundle</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
If you’ve named any part of your project differently you will need to ensure you make the relevant changes to your pom.xml file.
More information and another usage example may be found here: Simplericity: Making your Java app shine on OS X.
This step is recommended: add a “profiles.xml” file to your project.
Right click on “Project Files” and select “Create profiles.xml”.
Overwrite the file’s contents with:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!--
Project-local overrides to the build process based on detected or user-provided environmental parameters.
-->
<profilesXml xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/profiles-1.0.0.xsd">
<profiles>
<profile>
<id>Snapshots</id>
<repositories>
<repository>
<id>Codehaus Snapshots</id>
<url>http://snapshots.repository.codehaus.org/</url>
<snapshots>
<enabled>true</enabled>
</snapshots>
<releases>
<enabled>false</enabled>
</releases>
</repository>
</repositories>
<pluginRepositories>
<pluginRepository>
<id>Codehaus Snapshots</id>
<url>http://snapshots.repository.codehaus.org/</url>
<snapshots>
<enabled>true</enabled>
</snapshots>
<releases>
<enabled>false</enabled>
</releases>
</pluginRepository>
</pluginRepositories>
</profile>
</profiles>
<activeProfiles>
<activeProfile>Snapshots</activeProfile>
</activeProfiles>
</profilesXml>
5) Change project Java version: Right click on the root node of your project (mine, as seen above, is “quaqua_maven_netbeans (jar)) and select “Properties”. In the window that appears, select “Sources”. Here one may change the Java version used for this project. Change it to “1.5” and press “OK”.
6) Create a form for your project: Right click on the root node of your project and select “New > JFrame Form”. Give your new form a name, and make sure it is being added to the correct package. Press “Finish”. Delete the “App.java” file from your project. If you see errors in your new form’s source, open the project’s “Library” node. If one of the files in the library has a red “-” sign in its icon, you haven’t’ downloaded it yet. To do this, right click on the “Libraries” node and select “Download All Libraries”.
Now you should build your project. Right click on the root node and select “Build”. When it has finished, assuming there were no errors, navigate to your project’s directory. Within the “target” folder you should find a .zip, .dmg and .app file. Test out the .app file - it should open with no problems. If it doesn’t, make sure you haven’t missed any part of the above steps.
7) Setup Quaqua: Download the required Quaqua Look & Feel files.
Right click on the “Libraries” node of your project and select “Add Library”. Give the library a GroupID, ArtifactID and Version then press “OK”. Right click on the new library and select “Manually Install Artifact”. Press “Browse” and locate the “quaqua.jar” file, which will be in the “Quaqua/lib” folder that was created when you extracted the Quaqua archive downloaded previously.
In the constructor for the form you created earlier, paste the following:
//Make tabbed panes look like tabbed panes should
System.setProperty("Quaqua.tabLayoutPolicy","scroll");
//Move the menu bar to Mac OS X position
System.setProperty("apple.laf.useScreenMenuBar", "true");
// set the Quaqua Look and Feel in the UIManager
try {
UIManager.setLookAndFeel("ch.randelshofer.quaqua.QuaquaLookAndFeel");
// set UI manager properties here that affect Quaqua
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Appropriate error message");
// take an appropriate action here
}
More information about Quaqua can be found here: Quaqua Look & Feel.
To give a panel a nice Mac OS titled border, do the following:
Change to the design tab of your form. Add a Panel. Right click on the new panel and select “Customize Code”.
Below the panel’s initialisation line, paste:
TitledBorder titledBorder = new TitledBorder("Panel's Title");
aPanel.setBorder(titledBorder);
Change the name of the panel to whatever you’ve called your panel.
Change to the source view and fix the missing dependency.
Compile and run your project, which should look like this:
Now we’ll add a tab panel, to prove to ourselves that it really does look native.
To do this simply drag the “Tabbed Pane” from the palette into your JFrame. To add Tabs, drag JPanels into the Tabbed Pane.
Build your project, and run the App file that is generated.
This is what you should see:
And that’s it! You’ve successfully installed Netbeans 6.1, installed the Maven plugin, setup Macify and Quaqua!
No you’re ready to start creating the core functionality of your program - good luck!
The example project is available: download it here.
Scroll to top
Oops...
So I installed a plugin, ported my project over into the new plugin, and *bang* it stopped working.
I had to delete things randomly until I found the problem, then start rebuilding it according to the plugin’s specifications.
OK, so I’m glad it happened now, not later on when I would have lost even more, but I’m still not happy about repeating work.
I did, however, find out how to make Java applications look like native Mac OS X applications, which I thought was pretty cool.
Now I just have to get back to where I was, then figure out how the hell I’m going to solve the myriad of problems I know I’ll discover when the *real* coding begins.
Sigh.
RW Helper Update
Why? Because I don’t know Obective C, and don’t have time to learn it right now.
The program won’t be any worse because of this decision. I think, actually, it will be better, as I at least kind of know what I’m doing in Java. Kind of.
So I’ve set aside the whole weekend to do it - I’ll hopefully have it done by Sunday.
Until then!
Ah, also I’ll write a short tutorial on how to use JS-kit comments with greybox.