NetBeans Support Weblog: Tips , Tricks, Techniques and more

Plugin Providers for NetBeans 6.0

How does one find out where a plugin comes from? And how do we contact the plugin owners?

Plugin Providers

To view the list of all plugin providers registered with the current invocation of the ide, open the plugin manager (Tools | Plugins menu) and switch to the 'Settings' tab. Here you will see the list of available update centers, each with a name and an associated icon. Select an update center to view the URL associated with that update center.

1. Available Plugins 
• Switch to the 'Available Plugins' tab. For each available plugin, you will notice an associated icon under the 'Source' column; this is the same icon that is associated with the update center in 'Settings' tab.
  
• NetBeans Certified Plugin: Indicates that the plugin is present in 'NetBeans' update center.
• NetBeans Beta Plugin: Indicates that the plugin is present in ' NetBeans Beta' update center.
• Community Contributed Plugin: Indicates that the plugin is either from '3rd party plugins' update center or 'plugin portal' update center.
2. Installed and Updates Plugins
• Switching to either the 'installed' and 'updated' tabs, does not show the source of the plugin. Once installed, a module loses its history of origin.
  

How to followup with the plugin owners?

1. If the plugin is from 'NetBeans' or 'NetBeans beta' or 'thirdparty' update centers, then issuezilla is the best way to contact the owners, for feature requests and bug reports. 
• From the components page, select the appropriate component for NetBeans or NetBeans beta plugins or '3rd party' for third party update center plugins. (For '3rd party' components, if the relevant subcomponent for the plugin is not listed, naturally 'other' will need to be chosen).
2. For the plugins on the plugin portal, the index page for the plugin on the plugin portal is the best way to contact the owners. The entry 124662 in issuezilla addresses this issue.
   

Possible Issues

1. '3rd party' and 'Plugin Portal' update centers share the same icon. Would it be better if they had separate distinct icons? This may not really be an issue because once a third party plugin is selected in the 'Available Plugins' list, the right-hand panel displays information about the selected plugin, which includes a 'Source' item that seems to be the update center name rather than the center's icon's tooltip string.
2. The 'updates' tab should also possibly show the 'Source' column. With the installed plugins of course, unless the history is recorded somwhere, it is not possible to know where it came from originally. But with the 'updates', the plugin manager should definitely be aware of the catalog providing the update.
3. For NetBeans (including beta) plugins, it is not clear to know what the module's index page is. For instance, to locate the module page for eclipse importer module, http://projects.netbeans.org/ doesn't really help. Searching for 'eclipse' or 'importer' in that URL doesn't produce any results. One workaround is to use issuezilla and the ide component. From the components page: ide  ==> General IDE issues. *Use this category* if you know something is wrong with the IDE but are not sure where (bugs will be dispatched to other components as needed).

Update Center catalogs

The update center inspector is a good tool  to determine where a given plugin is located. For instance, to locate the plugins available on the plugin portal, copy its url from the plugin manager's settings tab and provide the url to the inspector. (This of course means searching all the centers one by one, but given that there are only four update centers in the default install, this isn't really hard...)