02 January 2019

Happy New Year!

The CoolBeans website got a lot of hits over the holidays, especially since it was linked on Hacker News. I read HN but I didn't expect that many hits. Luckily I picked a too big instance size on Google Cloud and the server worked smoothly.

Now that Apache NetBeans 10 has also been released I get a steady stream of folks in need of the JavaEE plugins. Many also want the C/C++ plugins.

Next releases

I forgot to bundle the Oracle JS module. This is available for install at runtime and shouldn't break anything but I wish I had included it just like nb-javac.

During the 1st trimester there will be another release including the C/C++ plugins.

The GlobalSign Extended Validation process for a code signing certificate is done. The hardware token has not arrived yet but safe to say Windows releases made this year will be digitally signed. (macOS images are already signed).

Known issues

• Phillip Kruger noticed the ZIP file references a relative JRE that's not bundled. This is somewhat by design as the ZIP may be used on any OS, not only Linux, and I didn't want to include any JRE. Yet, the relative ../jre path remained from the Windows and macOS installers which do bundle OpenJDK... Adding --jdkhome solves the problem.
• On macOS it's possible that the application crashes at start if it is moved to another folder after some time. John Jacoby discovered the bug and it seems to me to be a NetBeans caching issue (the IDE looks for the modules in the old place, doesn't find them then crashes). The workaround is to remove ~/Library/Caches/CoolBeans/2018.12/. A small release with a fix for this in the next 2 weeks.
• John Lavelle noticed the Help buttons don't work. I assume this is due to Apache NetBeans skipping JavaHelp. CoolBeans could ship with JavaHelp.

--emi

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