Monday May 16, 2005
Monday May 16, 2005
Plug JBoss, WebLogic, and WebSphere into NetBeans IDE 4.1
Following the instructions on the Server Plugins Project page, I downloaded the NetBeans IDE 4.1 sources and the serverplugins module. I then built the JBoss, WebLogic, and WebSphere plugins. (Just make sure, as specified on the page, that you don't build the sources using Ant 1.6.1. As I tried to do.) And, after everything had built successfully, I opened the IDE, registered my local installations of JBoss, WebLogic, and WebSphere, went to the Runtime window, started two of them (as well as Tomcat, but not the Sun Java System Application Server, which was already registered in the IDE) and this is what I saw:
The three new plugins are still at a very early experimental stage, as indicated on the page referenced above (for example, I didn't get any server-specific deployment descriptors when I selected JBoss, WebLogic, or WebSphere as my target server), but it's cool to see that there's already something there. And, even at this stage, the advantage of starting the server as a plugin versus starting it from an Ant script is clear: You can see the server's status! The text [running] in the illustration above looks really trivial, but it's not. When you start a server from an Ant script (whether it's hooked up to a menu item or not), there's no way of knowing whether the server is stopped or started. Especially when it's been running for a while and you've been doing a whole bunch of things in between, it's more than likely that you'll be asking yourself: "Now, is that server running? Did I even start it? Hmmm. Let's stop it, just to make sure. And then I'll start it again." But now, with the plugins, this is not a question you'll need to ask anymore because the server's status is easy to determine -- just look in the Runtime window. Remember that all three of these new plugins are in a very early development stage, though.
May 16 2005, 05:17:54 AM PDT Permalink
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