Netbeans 6.7 Beta + Maven = Heaven (more than promising)

I had problems with Netbeans 6.7 dev build, especially in the refactoring area, so I sticked with 6.5.1 and ignored the 6.7 stream completely. I started to use 6.7beta again. Some observations:

  1. L&F on Mac is really nice.
  2. "View -> Synchronize Editor Views" synchronizes the tabs with the project-tree (like in Eclipse) 
  3. Maven support is very promising:
    1. The performance is comparable with Ant projects
    2. Java EE support is (almost) as complete as in Ant (= Netbeans <= 6.5.1)
    3. You can create a Java EE project with a wizard which is comprised of several modules and deploy it with "run". (a multi-module project)
    4. Profiling and debugging work as expected
    5. The visualization of dependencies is not only useful - but it looks really nice
    6. You can open existing Maven projects, build them and deploy them on a Java EE server (I tested it with GV 2.1)
    7. There is no dependency on Netbeans (except a property in POM)
    8. The maven repository browser works and is useful
    9. "Compile on save" with Maven works and is even configurable
    10. Maven is able to start your server and deploy your app - its seemlessly integrated
  4. Kenai integration is really good.
  5. Had only briefly tested the hudson integration - but it worked so far.

What can be improved:

  1. Refactoring between maven-modules doesn't always work. E.g. I tried to rename an EJB 3 and the change was not recognized in WAR. In other cases it worked perfectly.
  2. The add-dependency wizard doesn't always work (but the code-completion in POM is even more useful and faster)
  3. NPE are occuring from time to time - but they seem not to be harmful.

 Summary: if you are using Maven, you have to try Netbeans 6.7. If you aren't using Maven but Java EE you should at least try it :-).

Comments:

Hmmm very nice!

I need to check it - especially

"# You can create a Java EE project with a wizard which is comprised of several modules and deploy it with "run". (a multi-module project)"
and
"# Maven is able to start your server and deploy your app - its seemlessly integrated"

looks very promising!

Posted by Piotr on May 19, 2009 at 12:50 PM CEST #

I'm also big fan of Maven 2 and NetBeans. There is a lot of nice improvements in NB 6.7 but one is still missing: reasonable mapping between Maven transitive dependencies and NetBeans platform non transitivie dependencies.

This drived me crazy for quite long time (when classloader rejected to load some class because it is available from multiple modules).

Posted by Tomáš Hubálek on May 19, 2009 at 02:30 PM CEST #

Tomas Hubalek: I suppose you comment on the nbm-maven-plugin dependency resolution mechanism. It's not directly relevant to the IDE integration (while it's me personally who works on both)
Have you tried the 3.0 version of the maven plugin? It does try to go an extra mile and examines the classes on the classpath and tries to warn about duplicates and possible clashes. There might be a bug, of course, so filing your usecase in mojo's jira would help. Alternatively some cases are a result of how NetBeans module system works and need to be resolved manually (eg. if 2 modules with no relationship both bundle log4j or commons-logging, you get a problem, we get the same problems with ant-based system when working in the IDE itself)

Posted by Milos Kleint on May 19, 2009 at 04:39 PM CEST #

I installed NB 6.7 precisely because I needed better Maven integration in my IDE, and Eclipse wasn't delivering. I was very impressed.

I did have to make sure my POM was set up to avoid NFS file dependencies (my network connection is rather slow), since NB seems to scan the dependencies quite frequently. All is goodness now!

Posted by Ron Ten-Hove on May 19, 2009 at 06:06 PM CEST #

The Maven support for NetBeans platform development is also much better and the Hudson integration is fantastic: You can upload a project from inside the IDE and the SVC settings etc. will be copied from your project, so it's really zero configuration...

See you at J1!

--Toni

Posted by Toni Epple on May 19, 2009 at 06:44 PM CEST #

After reading your entry I tried the Maven 2 support in NB 6.7 and I don't think it is a competitor to eclipse at the moment.
I didn't find a way to use a special settings.xml or to call Maven goal directly without having to edit the build action. Profiles can be specified but are not used.
Very dissatisfying! Especially since I like NB a lot.

Posted by Chris on May 19, 2009 at 08:36 PM CEST #

@Chris,

have to admit -> I had no time to compare it with Eclipse m2 plugin. But I migrated several NB Java EE 5 projects to "pure maven" projects and it worked very smoothly. Especially the GF v2 integration worked really nice. Even JAX-RS integration worked...
I personally was surprised by the quality - but submitted several bugs as well :-)

thanks for your comments!,

adam

Posted by Adam Bien on May 19, 2009 at 11:31 PM CEST #

@Toni

looking forward to meet you as well. It's seems like it is easier to meet us in Gdansk or San Francisco, than in Munich :-)

have fun with NB platform - but take a look at Java FX :-),

regards,

adam

Posted by Adam Bien on May 19, 2009 at 11:48 PM CEST #

@Chris running a custom goal is available from project's popup menu

you are the first person to ask about special settings.xml file, feel free to file an enhancement request with usecase description.

Posted by Milos Kleint on May 20, 2009 at 12:21 PM CEST #

I'm also using Netbeans 6.7 Beta + Maven. However one BIG problem I cannot overcome is that I cannot change the Source/Binary Format from 1.3 to 1.5 (or any other version). I get the error: IllegalArgumentException: old node must be in the tree.

I tried add the following to the pom.xml and reopen project but still not luck:
<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<source>1.5</source>
<target>1.5</target>
</configuration>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>

Posted by DK on May 20, 2009 at 06:39 PM CEST #

NetBeans IDE 6.7 is integrated with Project Kenai, a collaborative environment for developers to host open-source projects. With Kenai and the NetBeans IDE, a team of developers is able to create projects, check out, edit, debug, build, discuss, and commit code, all through one easy-to-use interface!

Posted by wow accounts on November 03, 2010 at 10:21 AM CET #

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