Force specific locale when working with NetBeans

To my surprise some messages in the NetBeans 6.7 Release Candidate 2 IDE are translated into Dutch. But I want to use the US English locale, because I am used to the English terms.

We can force NetBeans into using a specific locale. First we must open netbeans.conf in the NETBEANS_INSTALL_DIR/etc directory. Then we look for the key netbeans_default_options. We add the following to the options to force NetBeans into using the US English locale:

-J-Duser.language=en -J-Duser.country=US

One of the blog commenters suggests an even easier method to force a specific locale: use the IDE startup parameter --locale. So if we start NetBeans with the following startup parameter we use the US English locale:

$ netbeans --locale en:US

New life is born

Friday June 5th our son Liam is born! Mother and son are well. Time to enjoy!

Taglib uri suggestions in NetBeans

When we develop web applications with Java Server Pages (JSP) we probably need taglib declartions like this:

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>

NetBeans help us with selecting the correct uri attribute value. NetBeans shows a list of suggestions to use for the URI attribute. Besides the standard Sun tag libraries shows NetBeans also tag libraries we defined ourselves in our project: