Thursday December 08, 2005
Thursday December 08, 2005
JOnAS Plug-in for NetBeans IDE?
Some months ago, when some of the Sun Java Studio Creator developers were in town (i.e., here in Prague), I went out for a few drinks with some of them. At some point, I mentioned that we had put together a NetBeans Server-Skeleton Plug-in Tutorial. When he heard this, one of them laughed and, I remember his response very clearly—he said: "Wow! How big is your audience?!" What he meant was that he didn't think there'd be many people out there interested enough in creating server plug-ins for NetBeans to make the job of creating the tutorial worth the effort. I replied that if there was even one person out there who would find it useful enough to decide to create an additional server plug-in, then the creation of the tutorial would have been time well-spent. Imagine—we currently support the Sun Java System Application Server, JBoss Application Server, Tomcat Web Server, and Weblogic Application Server. If even one server were to be added to that list, that would be five server plug-ins instead of four. That's a big improvement and any new server plug-in would feature very high up on the list of features for the next release.
So, last week I received an e-mail from Manfred Riem, who is the Dutch translator of NetBeans IDE. He's translated a lot of the user interface and he also translates the NetBeans newsletters into Dutch. And guess what he wrote to tell me? He'd found the NetBeans Server-Skeleton Plug-in Tutorial and was in the process of creating support for JOnAS (Java Open Application Server). Now is that cool or what?
He sent me the sources of his plug-in today, because he's too busy with other things at the moment to complete it. But he got pretty far already. Here's what his plug-in looks like in the Projects window:
He's got pretty far, as you might be able to see. In fact, I can already register my JOnAS server (albeit without any server-specific settings) and start it (albeit with a hard-coded server location):
I can also set JOnAS as my target server (although I get an error message when I try to complete the wizard after choosing JOnAS):
So, Manfred's come a long way, but there's still some way to go and currently he's short of time. Is there anyone out there who'd be interested in taking the sources and continuing where Manfred left off? Remember, there's a tutorial (and a lot of NetBeans developers) to help you... If you're interested, please leave a note here or drop me an e-mail.
Dec 08 2005, 12:00:35 AM PST Permalink
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