NetBeans Module Development: Adding Dependencies

Today I played with NetBeans 5.0 support for NetBeans module development. Everything is really nice and I will definitely use it the next time I create a new NetBeans module (thanks Jesse and team!). But one thing totaly gets me. The way you add dependencies of your new module on other modules. You just type the name of the class that you want to use and the IDE selects the modules that contain the class, shows the description and javadoc (if available):

I wish we had something like this for other project types. The code completion only shows classes that are already on classpath and if you want to use a different class you have to know where it is. Of course the trick used here is that the universe of possible libraries is known upfront, it's just the APIs of modules in the target NetBeans platform, so the dialog knows where to look for them. But I would be happy if this worked for the libraries, projects that are currently open and perhaps recently open projects.

Maybe it could even be more integrated into code completion. If the class is not found in completion instead of "No Suggestions" you would have get a "Look for the class in libraries" item... Maybe this is also an answer to Geertjan's comment: "I don't like [...] that you need to manually put the EJB on the web application's classpath."
( Nën 06 2005, 10:34:13 MD EST ) Permalink Comments [0]