Introduction To Maven On The NetBeans Platform
After being labelled an
“an infinite cycle of despair” in Spillner’s ‘Ant Vs. Maven’
blog, Maven received a vote of confidence from
Geertjan Wielenga, technical writer in the NetBeans team, who
claimed it had “interesting benefits over Ant.” He pinpointed Maven
as a “BIG gap in the NetBeans Platform documentation” before
setting about to rectify this issue in his blog.
While Wielenga admits that you can find the necessary information
by running an internet search on “NetBeans Platform Maven” or
“NetBeans RCP Maven,” he complains that “the official docs all
assume you’re using Ant to build your application.” He gives a
run-through of what he calls “a simple NetBeans Platform “getting
started” scenario.” He uses the Maven NetBeans Platform Application
Archetype to lay the foundations of a simple application, and then
asks: “how much coding have I done to get to the above state of my
application? Answer: Nothing.”
His tutorial has drawn much interest, with one follower outlining
his own problems using the Maven NetBeans Platform Application
Archetype: “I have two nbm modules dependent on the same jar
module, this jar module will be packaged twice as a private library
of each nbm module. Besides redundancy this also has undesired
effect if this jar library should be shared because it maintains
internal state in static fields.” He complains the problem is
further exacerbated because “our code…depends on numerous
third-party libraries.”
However, in his tutorial Wielenga introduces IntelliJ IDEA
to provide an alternative perspective on the project structure of
the folders and files, leading one blog follower to draw the
conclusion “it shows that NetBeans is poor for Maven project
navigation and code editing. Otherwise, why would you introduce
IntelliJ IDEA here.”
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