Building Netbeans 5.0 NBMs for an entire suite

Creating NBMs (or Netbeans 5.0 Pluggins) for a large number of modules can be quite annoying. I decided to write my own ant task so that it will build all the modules in a suite and put the subsequent nbms into a local nbm directory. I figured others might be interested in these codes lines that can be added to your build.xml in your suite.
Make sure to add the following taskdef. You can get the foreach task as defined in nbbuild of the netbeans src. The following clip was taken from nbbuild/build.xml <taskdef name="for-each" classname="org.netbeans.nbbuild.ForEach" classpath="nbantext.jar"/>

Here is the build-nbm-pack:

<target name="build-nbm-pack" depends="init" description="Builds all modules into nbms">
        <delete dir="nbms"/>
        <mkdir dir="nbms" />

        <loadproperties srcFile="../mysuite/nbproject/project.properties">
           <filterchain>
                 <tokenfilter>
                   <deletecharacters chars=".."/>
                 </tokenfilter>
             </filterchain>
        </loadproperties>
       <for-each startdir=".." target="nbm" locations="${modules}" propertyna
me="nbm.target.dir" propertyvalue="${basedir}/nbms"/>
    </target>

Posted at 10:24AM Feb 08, 2006 by joellelam in Sun  |  Comments[9]

Netbeans 5.0 Pluggin Development

I just started working with the new Netbeans 5.0 release. Wow!! Some great changes have been made especially in the area of pluggin's. Watch out Eclipse! Within minutes you can use Netbeans to create a huge variety of applications. I am not just talking about development environments. Netbeans can provide any Rich Client Application Framework.

Here are some tutorials that I started with:
http://platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/quickstart-nbm.html

Thereis lots of additional documents to help you get started on almost anything.
http://platform.netbeans.org/index.html
http://platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/index.html


Even writing a simple paint application is easy.
http://platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/nbm-paintapp.html

You can download Netbeans 5.0 here:
http://www.netbeans.info/downloads/download.php?type=5.0

Side note: Netbeans 5.0 also has a mobility pack for those doing things like Palm development.

-Joelle

Posted at 11:12AM Feb 07, 2006 by joellelam in Sun  |  Comments[0]