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.”