James Selvakumar's Blog » netbeans

NetBeans and Maven – A quick start guide

James — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 13:56:12 +0000

A few months ago, I was reading the book “Wicket in Action”. I was new to Wicket and Maven then. I followed the instructions given in the book to create a maven project. The book went one step further and explained how to create eclipse and idea projects from the pom, but nothing was mentioned about NetBeans. I felt sad that there is no maven plugin out there to create projects that NetBeans can understand.

But later when I realized that there is no such need to create Netbeans projects from Maven pom, I was thrilled. Maven, is a first class citizen in NetBeans. Any Maven project “is a” NetBeans project.

Over the months, as I continued to learn and use Maven, NetBeans made the the learning curve easy. So I thought of putting up this post to benefit new Maven users.

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Book Review: NetBeans Platform 6.9 Developers Guide

James — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 05:19:35 +0000

As I started reading a couple of chapters, I got impressed with the way the content is delivered.

The book starts with the traditional “Hello World” module and takes the reader to the advanced topics in an elegant and seamless manner. The author makes good use of screenshots which will help the beginners a lot.

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Developing a simple pluggable java application

James — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 13:56:34 +0000

Most of the applications we use on daily basis are pluggable. Popular applications like Firefox, Eclipse, NetBeans, JEdit, WordPress, Hudson are all pluggable. In fact, pluggability has played a major part in the success of most of these applications. Why not make the Java applications we develop pluggable as well? Yes, we get pluggability out of the box, if our applications are based on a rich client platform like NetBeans or Eclipse. But for some reasons if you decide not to use those platforms, it doesn’t mean that they should not be pluggable. In this article, we will learn how to write a simple pluggable application that will load it’s plugins dynamically.

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What UML Tools do you use?

James — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:48:10 +0000

Poll: What UML Tools do you use?

Most popular Subversion clients

James — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:44:57 +0000

Subversion is a very popular version control system. As a result, subversion has a wide array of client tools which makes life difficult for us, the users. So we wanted to know what our readers actually use and here is the summary of their opinions. Read more from SolitaryGeek.

Hudson CI Server – A quick start guide

James — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:43:20 +0000

Learn how to setup Hudson Continuous Integration server to automate your build process from this solitarygeek.com post.

NetBeans 6.7 – A quick glance

James — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:38:10 +0000

NetBeans 6.7 has been out for quite a while. It has got some cool new features like Hudson Integration, Issue tracker integration etc. Learn more about these features from this solitarygeek.com post.

New kid NetBeans giving tough time to other PHP IDEs out there…

James — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 03:16:09 +0000

It seems, NetBeans has been making waves (or rather tsunami?) in the PHP world. According to the article “The Big PHP IDE Test“, NetBeans, a new kid to the PHP land is found to provide almost all the features of established commercial PHP IDEs like Aptana Pro ($99), Zend Studio ($399) at the best cost possible ($0) .

Great news and thank you NetBeans team for making the “Only IDE you need” available to PHP folks with many advanced features.

Goosh – The fastest way to search NetBeans wiki?

James — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:49:54 +0000

Whether you are new to NetBeans or not, NetBeans wiki is a great place to find many NetBeans related tips and tricks. It is from here that I learned about installing NetBeans IDE in Ubuntu when I switched from Windows. Not only that, I keep coming back to these wikis whenever I need some help with NetBeans IDE.

But since NetBeans adoption is growing at such a rapid rate, it’s no surprise that the number of NetBeans wikis has grown exponentially too. Yes, there is an inbuilt search function to help you find what you want, but if you want to search something very quickly, then you might find goosh very useful.

Goosh is a shell or terminal or command line interface to access google services. To use goosh, just open your browser and then point it to “goosh.org“. Now you can search the NetBeans wiki pages damn quickly by entering the command “site wiki.netbeans.org ”. For example, if you want to find a solution to solve the garbled text problem you face when using NetBeans on Ubuntu, you would enter “site wiki.netbeans.org garbled text” in the goosh terminal.

You can find more information about goosh from my post, “Goosh – A fantastic front-end to Google Services”.

Getting NetBeans ready for work on Ubuntu 8.10

James — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:39:16 +0000

Now that you have upgraded from Windows to Ubuntu (like me ), let’s see how to setup NetBeans quickly on your new Ubuntu machine without wasting much time.

Step 1: Install JDK

Install jdk on your machine using the super easy install option in Ubuntu. Open the terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

This will install the latest jdk available in the Ubuntu repository. This is cool because, you need not worry about updating your jdk whenever a new release is available. Your system’s “Update Manager” will take care of the rest.

Once the jdk is downloaded, you will be prompted to agree a license agreement in the terminal. Press “TAB” key to select the “Ok” option and then press “Enter”.

Next you will be shown another prompt, use your “arrow” keys to select “Yes” option and press “Enter” to start the install process.

Step 2: Install NetBeans

Verify whether jdk is installed on your machine by typing “java -version” in the terminal. If everything is ok, go and get yourself a copy of netbeans installer.

Once the netbeans installer is downloaded, right click the downloaded file (which should have “.sh” extension), click “Properties”, go to the “Permissions” tab and check the “Allow executing file as program” checkbox.

Now double click the file and click “Run” to start the installation process.

Step 3: Start NetBeans with Nimbus Look and Feel

Let’s face it. The default look and feel (GTK) of NetBeans on Ubuntu (and that of Ubuntu too) sucks. You probably don’t want your friends to ridicule your IDE and say “Is this NetBeans 1.0?”. You don’t want that, right?

But fortunately, there is a saviour in the form of “Nimbus” which is available from JDK 6 Update 10 onwards. And instructing NetBeans to start with “Nimbus” look and feel is very easy. Just right click your “NetBeans” icon on your desktop and click “Properties”. In the “Command” text field add the word ” –laf Nimbus”.

In my case, it looks like:

/bin/sh “/home/james/netbeans-6.5/bin/netbeans” –laf Nimbus

Now restart NetBeans to see your IDE skinned in Nimbus.

Tip:
If you want NetBeans to look like other apps on your system, skin your Ubuntu with Nimbus theme too.

Step 4: Configure your video driver to ensure that NetBeans displays large files properly

In a perfect world, you don’t need this step but unfortunately you might need to configure your video driver properly to ensure that NetBeans displays large files properly. Otherwise, your IDE editor might display large files like this when you scroll your mouse:

Relax, this is not a bug in NetBeans but rather it’s just a little misconfiguration by Ubuntu. Fortunately, there is a solution to this issue and follow this netbeans wiki page to solve this.

Step 5: Choose the right font for your editor

Some of you might not like the default font used by the NetBeans editor on Ubuntu. For example, I like the crispy “Bitstream Vera Sans Mono” font with font size “13″. But if you are satisfied with the default editor font, it’s fine.

Step 6: Install path-tools plugin to integrate NetBeans with your filesystem browser

I strongly recommend you to use the excellent “path-tools” plugin which help you to integrate your NetBeans IDE with the nautilus file manager in Ubuntu. With this plugin, you can easily navigate to your netbeans projects located in your filesystem. Go grab it from the plugin portal.

And don’t forget to install your favourite version control system like subversion, mercurial, git etc to enjoy the benefits offered by your IDE.

That’s it for now. It will be great to see your suggestions, comments and tips you employ on your Ubuntu machine. Enjoy..!