Netbeans 4 and project structure

Thread view:

Nigel Wade - 08 Feb 2005 14:20 GMT

Hi,

I've been testing out Netbeans 4 with a view to using it to manage my source
code. However, I don't see any way to impose any structure into the
organization of what Netbeans refers to as "projects". At the moment it
looks to me as though every "project", be it a low level class library for
data file access, an applet, application, GUI form etc. are all treated at
the same conceptual level within the projects view. All of them are lumped
into one mass view of everything which is Java.

Am I missing something here? Is there some way of organizing Netbeans
"projects" so that I can differentiate between a jar which is part of a
real-time data visualization application and a GUI which forms part of a
system administration project for managing a mail server LDAP database?

For the life of me I can't find it. I've searched Usenet and netbeans.org
and can't find anything which might indicate how I could do this. To me it
would be like going back to the bad old days before hierarchical
filesystems, when no strucure was possible.

Signature

Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group,
University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
E-mail : nmw@ion.le.ac.uk
Phone : +44 (0)116 2523548, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555

Reply to this Message

Mark Murphy - 09 Feb 2005 07:56 GMT

> Hi,
>
[quoted text clipped - 5 lines]
> the same conceptual level within the projects view. All of them are lumped
> into one mass view of everything which is Java.

Nigel-
I have been playing with NB for a while and I think I understand your
question. It's not were the files are actually located, but in the
projects panel the fact that all of the projects are listed out together
without any distinction. If this is what you are asking about then no I
have not found a way that you can list projects in "project folders".

However to me it's not a big deal because I only have the projects that
I am currently working on open. This does not prevent me from linking
projects if say a library is used by another application, but it does
keep my list of open projects uncluttered. You will also probably
increase speed because you are not scanning those other directories.

To be honest I had a hard time moving to NB4. It was a big change from
3.6, but now that I am more familiar with it I love it. Is it perfect,
NO, will it work for everyone, NO. But I think they are making the hard
decisions to make design changes which may hurt them in the short term
but will help them in the long run.

M

Reply to this Message

Nigel Wade - 09 Feb 2005 12:17 GMT

>> Hi,
>>
[quoted text clipped - 12 lines]
> without any distinction. If this is what you are asking about then no I
> have not found a way that you can list projects in "project folders".

Yes, that's exactly what I mean. The underlying organisation of the source,
class, jar files etc. is of secondary importance. It seems that the current
NetBeans has got it arse-about-tit and provided plenty of opportunity to
organise the way the code is stored, but no way to organise they way it is
presented. What matters to me in an IDE is how the structure is presented
to me, not how it is actually stored in the filesystem (well, it does, but
that's another issue) - i.e it should be capable of making order out of
chaos rather than creating chaos from order.

> However to me it's not a big deal because I only have the projects that
> I am currently working on open. This does not prevent me from linking
> projects if say a library is used by another application, but it does
> keep my list of open projects uncluttered. You will also probably
> increase speed because you are not scanning those other directories.

I tend to switch between development projects as required. With NB4 this
either means confusing the "project" targets in one display, or manually
closing all "projects" from one and then opening the "projects" for the
other. Messy and time consuming, with no way to easily switch back to where
you were before.

As I see it the only solution would be to create specific user ids for each
project. But that presents many other problems.

> To be honest I had a hard time moving to NB4. It was a big change from
> 3.6, but now that I am more familiar with it I love it. Is it perfect,
> NO, will it work for everyone, NO. But I think they are making the hard
> decisions to make design changes which may hurt them in the short term
> but will help them in the long run.

I do like the ability to automatically generate Ant scripts, and the way it
controls the filesystem organization is really good. It's just that the
"project" window makes NB4 a non-starter for me. I develop hierarchically
and work on several projects simultaneously so I really need to be able to
see the heirarchy reflected in the IDE, and to be able to switch quickly
and easily between projects.

I've just installed the latest version of Eclipse, and the Visual Editor, so
I hope that this will be more logical in it's approach to how packages,
jars, applets etc are organized and displayed.

Signature

Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group,
University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
E-mail : nmw@ion.le.ac.uk
Phone : +44 (0)116 2523548, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555

Reply to this Message

hilz - 11 Feb 2005 00:19 GMT

By the way, you can get more help if you use the netbeans mailing lists:
http://www.netbeans.org/community/lists/

and if you prefer news groups to mailing lists, you can still access them
throught gmane. Just look for "NTTP access" on the page shown above.

good luck.
hilz

Reply to this Message

Netbeans 4 and project structure

Free Magazines