Thursday November 01, 2007
Thursday November 01, 2007
5 Advantages of the Plugin Portal
I have over 20 plugins in the NetBeans Plugin Portal. If nothing else, this qualifies me as someone who knows a bit about usage of this cool site, which is mainly driven by David Botterill. Here are the top 5 aspects, as far as I am concerned.
- Simplicity. You can very easily upload your plugin. No pain at all. Click an Upload button, fill in a very few details, and Bob's your auntie.
- Statistics. Simple as falling off a log to see which of your plugins are most popular. Here are my top plugins:
Knowing which ones are most popular is a bit meaningless, because it says nothing about their quality. It simply shows how many people downloaded your plugin and, as far as I am aware, if one person clicks the Download button 50 times, you'll have 50 new additions to your Download number.
- Storage. No simpler way of safely storing a plugin in progress than to upload it to the Plugin Portal.
- Publicity. Many eyeballs are on that Plugin Portal and it is also available in the IDE, via the Plugin Manager, if you install the plugin that makes the Plugin Portal update center available to the IDE.
- Categories. Once you've put your plugin in a category, you can use the tag cloud on the right hand side of the Plugin Portal to see other similar plugins that might relate to your own.
There are some imperfections, but I think the Plugin Portal is already a very useful facility. Thanks Dave for all the work that went into it. It's really added a significant extension to the NetBeans community experience.
In other news. Check out two really cool articles by Wouter van Reeven, Building Enterprise Applications for GlassFish using Netbeans 6.0 (Beta 2) and Maven2 and Deploying to GlassFish using Maven2.
Nov 01 2007, 04:16:58 PM PDT Permalink
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