Friday August 04, 2006
Sun Java Studio Creator 2 and Version Control: Part 1
Sun Java Studio Creator 2 and Version Control: Part 1
Sun Java Studio Creator 2 takes advantage of the NetBeans Platform
Version Control System (VCS). Specifically, Creator supports CVS and
Visual Source Safe(VSS). I'll be focusing some blog entries on doing version control using Creator and CVS.
Creator web applications consist of files organized at the project
level. The project file structure can be seen in the "Files" window
next to the "Projects" window.
Preparing a Project For Version Control
Library References
Before adding a project to CVS, you must make sure all the
necessary files are part of the project. You don't want logical
references
outside the project structure. The NetBeans project structure
supports a logical library reference. A library reference is a
collection of Jar files. Creator ships with some standard library
references that are part of each developers environment. To make a
project “portable” you must be careful defining library
references. Library references are typically defined either at the
user level or at the System level. This means if you define a
library reference, that library reference definition will be in your
user directory and not in the project file structure. If you need to
add Jar files to your project, avoid using libraries references.
Instead, you need to add the Jar file to a
directory within the project structure. For example, if you are
using the Hibernate framework and want to add
“hibernate3.jar” to your
project, you would do the following.
- You should first create a directory called “projectlibs”
within the project. like the following.
- Next, you'll add the “hibernate.jar” file to
the directory by doing an "File->Add existing Item->Other". Note
that you'll have to move (cut/paste) the Jar file from the source
folder because that's where Creator puts it by default.
- Lastly, you'll do an “Add Jar/Folder...” from the
project “Libraries” node and add the Jar file. This will ensure
that the Jar file can be controlled by CVS and available to all team
members working on the project.
AJAX Components
When you drop an AJAX component on a
web page in Creator, Jar files are added to the project directory
“lib/complibs”. Also, a library reference is created to
reference this set of Jar files. The library reference is created in
your user directory. If you open your library references and select the
AJAX Blueprint that was created, you'll see something similar to the
following.
When the first AJAX component is dropped on the designer, a
library reference is created in your user directory. The file
where the library reference is created is "build.properties".
Since the user directory can't be included with the project,
you'll need to take steps to add the Jar references that were added to
the project "lib/complibs" to the project libraries. To do this,
right-click on the "Libraries" node under the "Project" window and
select "Add JAR/Folder..." like this.
You will need to add these files from the "lib/complibs/ui.complibxxxxx" directory.
- ui.jar
- ui-dt.jar
- shale-remoting.jar
The following figure shows what this will look like. Notice that
you have to select "package" for the "ui.jar" and the
"shale-remoting.jar" so they will be deployed with the web application.
While you're in this dialog, remove the reference to the
"xxx_Design-time_BluePrints_AJAX_Components".
You'll also need to remove any library references in your project to
the AJAX runtime library references in your user directory
"build.properties". This is a little more involved. You'll
have to search for all references to the runtime library reference in
the "nbproject" directory.
From the "Files" window, select the
"nbproject" directory, right-click and select "Find...". Enter
"Runtime_BluePrints" as the search string and search. You'll be
presented with a set of hits at the bottom of the IDE.
Double-clicking on each entry will open the file and position the
cursor at the hit in the file. You need to remove each line found
in every file. In the "project.xml" file, you'll need to
delete the entire "<library>" element for the reference.
Repeat
the find/replace process for the string "Design-time_BluePrints".
The good news is you will only need to do this once per project
for AJAX components. The next time you open the project, you may
see a dialog like the one below. Simply press the "Regenerate"
button and proceed.
Testing the Project
Now you should test your project for "portability". That is, you
want to test whether or not you've successfully taken care of file
references that are outside the project file system. To do this,
simply
MOVE the entire project
folder, "webapplication1" for example, to a different location.
Once you've moved the project folder, try to open it in Java
Studio Creator from the new location. If the "Project" window
node for your project shows up red. If you open the "Resolve
Reference Problems..." as show below, you can see the resources that
you missed.
Also, do a "clean and build project" from the project node to make sure you've included all the necessary external Jar files.
Adding the Project to CVS
At this point, your project should be ready to add to CVS. Please check out the article, "Source Code Control in the Sun Java Studio Creator 2 IDE" for details on setting up CVS and adding your project.
IMPORTANT - The
only tip I would add to this is about ignoring certain files. For
sure you want to ignore the "nbproject\genfiles.properties" from CVS
since it represents IDE session specific information. To do this,
go to the "Versioning" window next to the "Palette" window.
Select the "genfiles.properties" file under the "nbproject"
directory. Right-click on the file and select "CVS->ignore".
This will create a ".cvsignore" file in the "nbproject" directory
for that file.
Next Time
In my next blog, I plan to discuss a technique for specifying multiple
navigation files so multiple developers can add to the page navigation
simultaneously.
Posted by david
( Aug 04 2006, 07:20:05 PM MDT )
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