Michael Bien's Weblog

If you are using GIT as SCM and NetBeans as IDE you should probably check out NBGit. The plugin integrates GIT in NetBeans in the same way as the out of the box Mercurial support does it. In fact both modules have the same origin since nbgit is a fork of the mercurial integration project and incrementally adds features to catch up.

NBGit Version 0.3 is already fairly stable and provides the basic set of features you would expect from distributed versioning system IDE integration.

Features

• Graph visualization of parallel branches (Browser similar to giggle)
• Versioning History (git log)
• Show changes (git status)
• update/commit/reset
• clone/clone other/git init
• custom actions (custom git commands)
• diff
• in-editor annotation of code changes
• ignore files (parsing '.gitignore' files)
• git properties (username, email etc via options)

The project is developed by volunteers outside Sun, if you like to see GIT integration as out-of-the-box feature in a future version of NetBeans please vote for this RFE.

I use the plugin for most of my open source projects and haven't experience any serious issues so far. I would say its already safe to use since you can't do anything wrong if you do a 'git status' -> 'git push' via command line as last step anyway.

Screenshots

The XPath Utility I submitted to the NetBeans Plugin Portal over two months ago has been recently verified against NetBeans 6.7. This makes the plugin now directly available from within the IDE over the Plugin manager (Tools -> Plugins).

One .nbm less to carry with me ;)

I built some time ago a NetBeans plugin which simplifies browsing through large xml documents a bit. Just start typing a XPath expression in the text field of the TopComponent and the result of the (last) xml editor in focus are computed and printed in the textarea below. (You can open the XPath window either by using the context menu on xml files or directly via the window menu)

It uses the JDK's javax.xml.xpath package which means XPath 1.0 support.

it also supports basic auto completion:

localized error messages (in other words: XPathExpressionException.getCause().getLocalizedMessage()):

I uploaded the module to the plugin portal. Feel free to use it ;)

If you develop NetBeans modules you probably also wondered how to add a pre-packaged .nbm file as dependency to your module or how to use modules in multiple suites.

After some search I found that there is currently no official supported way for doing this. The reason is the bidirectional dependency between the suite and each module in the suite. This makes it hard to reuse modules across suites but it is still possible. In this entry I will describe different techniques/hacks to workaround this issue. (Note: technique, hack and workaround in the same sentence ;) )

In general, you can add a dependency to a module when the module you like to depend on is in:

a) your suite

b) the target NetBeans platform (default target platform is the installed IDE)

As mentioned above a) works only for one suite -> only b) is left

option 1. Assemble your own target platform:

point and click

• Either make a copy of NetBeans, or if there's a lot of stuff you don't want, create an empty suite. Then build it and create a zip distribution and unpack that
• Launch the result
• In Tools | Plugins, install the module(s) you want globally (check the "Force install into shared directories" checkbox)
  
• Shut it down
  
• In your real IDE, use Tools | NetBeans Platforms to point at the copy of the platform that now has the module you want in it
  
• Set your suite to build against that. It should pick up the module you installed and all classes in it's public packages
  

or put it in a build script

option 2. Install the module into your IDE:

point and click

• enable "Force install into shared directories" in Tools | Plugins | Settings
• install your module(s)
• restart NetBeans
  
• your module is now in the extra cluster and part of your IDE
  

or declarative

edit Info/index.xml inside your .nbm file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE module PUBLIC "-//NetBeans//DTD Autoupdate Module Info 2.5//EN" "http://www.netbeans.org/dtds/autoupdate-info-2_5.dtd">
<module codenamebase="org.yourorghere.module4" distribution="" downloadsize="0" global="true" homepage="" license="AD9FBBC9" moduleauthor="Michael Bien" needsrestart="false" releasedate="2008/04/07" targetcluster="milkyway">
    <manifest AutoUpdate-Show-In-Client="true" OpenIDE-Module="org.yourorghere.module4" OpenIDE-Module-Implementation-Version="080407" OpenIDE-Module-Java-Dependencies="Java &gt; 1.5" OpenIDE-Module-Name="module4" OpenIDE-Module-Requires="org.openide.modules.ModuleFormat1" OpenIDE-Module-Specification-Version="1.1"/>
    <license name="AD9FBBC9">[NO LICENSE SPECIFIED]
</license>
</module>

alternatively you can add the flags to module/nbproject/project.properties and rebuild/create NBM (if source available)

nbm.is.global=true
nbm.target.cluster=milkyway

Now when you install the module with Tools | Plugins, NetBeans will place the module directly into the installation folder in the new created "milkyway" cluster. With this trick you should be able to use the same library wrapper module in as many suites you want.

Thanks to all on the mailing lists for the help on that topic.

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I am already looking forward to JSR 277 which will hopefully replace the current implementation of the NetBeans module system. (no there was nothing anounced but this would make defenetive sense)