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NetBeans support for Drupal CMS

Drupal is a free and open-source modular framework and content management system (CMS) written in PHP. Recently, it won the best PHP Open-Source CMS from Packt Publishing. I have been working on providing NetBeans support for Drupal. As a part of this, I have identified in what way can the support be provided and implementing it accordingly. The details are uploaded over here.

Accordingly, we have documented steps for hosting a Drupal-based website through NetBeans IDE which includes downloading the Drupal source PHP files and uploading it onto a web server (preferably Apache), all through NetBeans IDE. You can find the documentation over here. Also, a NetBeans plugin has been developed for assisting Drupal Module development. The plugin provides a wizard to create a new Drupal module, and on entering the module details and clicking on finish, the IDE automatically generates the <modulename>.info, <modulename>.install and <modulename>.module files along with the template code. It generates this module under <DrupalSource>/sites/all/modules. The template code is generated sticking to the Drupal Coding Standards. The following screenshots give a visual overview of how the plugin works.

1. Wizard to create a module

2. Newly created module (feed) as seen in Project Hierarchy

3. Newly generated feed.info, feed.module and feed.install files with template codes for hook implementations

The plugin and documentation of how to install and use it are available over here.

Posted at 10:15AM Oct 31, 2008 by Sujit Nair in Sun  |  Comments[0]

Happy 10th Birthday, NetBeans!

NetBeans celebrates its 10th Birthday throughout the months of October, 2008. Its been 10 long years and the IDE has evolved into the present dominating position! You can have a look at the history of NetBeans over here. And here's what one of the founders of NetBeans, Jaroslav Tulach, had to say on this auspicious occasion. Good luck to NetBeans in future!

And along with these celebrations, the NetBeans 6.5 Release Candidate 2 was released! It comes with some great feature list with PHP support totally revamped, and lots others. Some of the features I really liked and would love to explore further are :

-- PHP editing features like code completion, syntactic and semantic code highlighting (Since I am working on providing NetBeans support for Drupal).

-- Automatic deploy on save for Web applications

-- Automatic compile on save for Java

-- Improved Eclipse project import and synchronization for Java and web projects.

-- Deadlock detection with visual indication for Java debugging

Posted at 09:29AM Oct 31, 2008 by Sujit Nair in Sun  |  Comments[0]