Friday August 31, 2007 Seapegasus Blog
Friday August 31, 2007 Native Mac Installer Vs. Sensible NetBeans.app?
After I mentioned the new Mac installer for NetBeans 6, Ben asked me, "What's wrong with putting it in a .app package like any sensible OS X app?"
NetBeans itself of course is just a normal executable .app file that you can put anywhere on your Mac's harddrive. So what does the installer do?
The installer just makes it easier to download sets of NetBeans add-on packs and install them in one go. After the download, you use the installer to select your custom combination of packs: Web + Enterprise + Ruby, Mobility + C/C++, Mocca + Lemon, or whatever you need.
Speaking of Mocca and Lemon ice cream (which I personally quite like): Of course there are typical sets of functionality that developers will want more often than others, e.g. Base IDE + Java SE packs, or Base IDE + Java EE packs + webservers, etc. For such cases there are smaller downloads that only contain one related set of packs.
Installing a smaller set does not mean that you are stuck with a "limited edition". You can go to the Tools>Plugins menu, and download and install plugins and packs (= set of plugins) that you skipped first. (This is new, the old Update Center didn't contain packs.) Click "Available Plugins" and sort them by category to see what's there.
PS: If you want a download without an installer, you can get a plain platform-independent zip distribution (the link can be found at the bottom of the last download page) -- which does run on MacOS, but (sorry Ben) it doesn't contain a native netbeans.app.
Posted by seapegasus ( Aug 31 2007, 06:45:51 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [2]Post a Comment:
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Actually, we are going to switch to native Mac installers to create a more Mac-like user experience. Even at the cost that the user will not be able to customize what's being installed -- but will still be able to select from the prepackaged options (Java, Web and Java EE, Ruby, etc.) The installers are already being built - see the *.dmg at: http://bits.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.0/nightly/latest/bundles/
and hopefully will be tested and ready for Beta1.
Posted by Pavel Buzek on August 31, 2007 at 08:30 PM CEST #
I hope there will be a Java EE option that *does not* force a runtime on me. I certainly don't want to duplicate my existing Glassfish installation. I prefer to manage this outside of my IDE install.
If you are using the OS X .pkg file, customization certainly is an option. Glancing at the developer tools you can create a Metapackage Project and allow for the customization of the contained packages. This would seem to enable what the old installed allowed in terms of customization.
Posted by Matthew Montgomery on August 31, 2007 at 10:10 PM CEST #