406 Not Acceptable

J2ME Polish is a really neat package for J2ME programming. Really all I want it for is to change all my annoying Vectors into ArrayLists for speed. Now there are a few issues with the integration plugin on both Windows and Linux when using Netbeans. Heck it doesn’t even work properly on Netbeans 5.5, never mind Netbeans 6, 6.1, or 6.5…

Now what’s the only thing better than a poor integration plugin? No support, that’s what! A quick check on the J2ME Polish forums and you will find numerous posts asking how to fix these errors. So if you’ve tried going to the forums and had no luck (like everyone else,) you’ve come to the right place.

So here are a list of the problems and how to fix them.

 When starting NetBeans it prompts you with a message that states “org.netbeans.modules.java.platform/1 >1.10 required version found 1.9.2″(Or some other version) with options “Disable and continue or Exit”.

This one’s an annoying one, which occurs every now and again. I got this on 6.0 on Linux and 5.5 on Windows, but not with 6.5 on Windows. So how do you fix it?

Go to:

/usr/share/netbeans/platform7/modules

or in Windows (x being a version number)

Program Files\NetBeans 6.x\nb6.x\modules

If you can’t find this folder just search for  “de-enough-polish-netbeans.jar” as this is the file you need to edit. Open up “de-enough-polish-netbeans.jar” with a zip program (Winrar, rileroller, Winzip, etc) and edit the file at META-INF/MANIFEST.MF wih a text editor (notepad.) There will be a sentence that states:

org.netbeans.modules.java.platform/1 > 1.10

Change it to

org.netbeans.modules.java.platform/1 > 1.0

Reactivate the plugin in Netbeans and enjoy!

You are prompted to resolve reference problems relating to “Emulator Platform” or “SUN WTK 2.2 etc…” not being found.

This occurs to everyone…

Go to your an existing (non polish) project folder and open the folder nbproject. There should be a file called project.properties, open this with a text editor. Scroll down and there should be two lines stating:

platform.active=Sun_Java_TM__Wireless_Toolkit_2_5_2_for_CLDC
platform.active.description=Sun Java(TM) Wireless Toolkit 2.5.2 for CLDC

The versions may be different, as you may have a later Wireless Toolkit!

Now open the same file in your J2ME Polish project and replace the platform.active and platform.active.description lines with the ones from the non polish project.

Replace every occurance of “MPowerPlayer” with Sun_Java_TM__Wireless_Toolkit_2_5_2_for_CLDC (or what you had in your old project.)

Replace every occurance of “Emulator Platform” with Sun Java(TM) Wireless Toolkit 2.5.2 for CLDC  (or what you had in your old project.)

Close Netbeans and reopen and all should be fixed!

After installing Netbeans 6 RC 1 I never really turned back to Netbeans 5.5.1, Netbeans 6 enabled me to be far more productive when coding. The highlighting, searching, and better auto commenting features were enough to make me delete Netbeans 5. Especially after the RC was stable enough to work with. Now Netbeans 6.1 beta 2 has recently appeared, it seems I missed out on having a look at beta 1. At least that means I get to test a more stable IDE.

Now the one huge difference with Netbeans 6.1 is the start up speed. It is almost instant, well in Netbeans terms anyway. On my home system — without any tweaks to the IDE — it loads up my last project in just under 10 seconds. Now you probably want to now how long Netbeans 6 takes, well that takes… 17 seconds (yes, I did just count.) So, for me at least, Sun aren’t making things up about the increased speed of the program.

According to Sun:

• Faster cold start and improved startup sequence. Up to 40% faster (with a project opened). Opening projects does not block startup. Go to Type dialog available even during post-startup scanning of sources.
• Various optimizations to reduce I/O and file access (touching disk), improving responsiveness in many situations, especially on slower filesystems (e.g. on network).
• Incremental parsing in java editor speeding up code completion and improving responsiveness of the editor especially with large files (see below).
• Improvements in JSP parser (caching, memory management, update strategies), leading to faster code completion and editor.
• Improvements in Visual Web designer — faster page opening and table drop, lower memory usage, fixed memory leaks, and more (see below).

It seems this major speed improvement is new to beta 2, so if you’re still stuck on beta 1 you might want to change.

There’s also some nice eye candy in there, it seems everyones on the transparency train these days!

I’ve only had one hiccup with the IDE so far, a button just wouldn’t delete in my Gui when using Matisse. I kept getting a little warning light about an error, so I happily submitted the problem. I ended up just tossing the button out of my gui as just one more ‘other component’ (the Netbeans equivalent of tossing it overboard!)