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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
With the increasing complexity of software development and the abundance of tools available, learning your IDE in-depth will instantly increase your developer productivity. NetBeans is the only IDE that can be downloaded with Java itself and provides you with many cutting edge features not readily available with many IDEs. The IDE also provides a great set of tools for PHP and C/C++ developers. It is free and open source and has a large community of users and developers around the world.
This book will teach you to ace NetBeans IDE and make use of it in creating Java business and web services. It will help you to become a proficient developer and use NetBeans for software development. You will learn effective third-party interaction and enable yourself for productive database development.
Moving on, you will see how to create EJB projects and write effective and efficient web applications. Then you will learn how to use Swing and manage and configure a relational database. By the end of the book, you will be able to handle external services such as databases, Maven repositories, and cloud providers, and extend your NetBeans when you require more from your IDE.
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Seitenzahl: 328
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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Table of Contents
Mastering NetBeans
Mastering NetBeans
Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: August 2015
Production reference: 1250815
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78528-264-5
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Credits
Author
David Salter
Reviewers
Michel Graciano
Halil Karaköse
Mario Pérez Madueño
Commissioning Editor
Nadeem Bagban
Acquisition Editor
Larissa Pinto
Content Development Editor
Anand Singh
Technical Editor
Ankita Thakur
Copy Editor
Swati Priya
Project Coordinator
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Proofreader
Safis Editing
Indexer
Monica Ajmera Mehta
Production Coordinator
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Cover Work
Arvindkumar Gupta
About the Author
David Salter is an enterprise software developer and architect who has been developing software professionally since 1991. His relationship with Java goes right back to the beginning, when he used Java 1.0 to write desktop applications and applets for interactive websites. He has been developing enterprise Java applications using both Java EE (and J2EE) and open source solutions since 2001. He has also written NetBeans IDE 8 Cookbook and Seam 2.x Web Development and coauthored Building SOA-Based Composite Applications Using NetBeans IDE 6, all by Packt Publishing.
First and foremost, I would like to thank my wife and family for putting up with my many hours at the computer while writing this book. Special thanks and love to my wife for all her encouragement and support.
I'd also like to say thanks to all the people at Packt Publishing for helping me with this book. Thank you, Larissa, for your encouragement from the beginning. I would also like to thank Anand and Ankita for their hard work in helping me complete this book.
Finally, thanks to everyone who has worked on NetBeans, making it the product it is today. Without you all, this book would not exist.
About the Reviewers
Michel Graciano is highly familiar with development techniques, such as object- and component-oriented programming, design patterns' applicability, and software analysis. An expert in application development with open source software, he is currently working as an instructor at Código Efetivo, a training company in Brazil.
He is actively involved with open source projects, such as NetBeans, and has delivered talks at JustJava, The Developer's Conference, and JavaOne conferences.
His longtime contributions to NetBeans started with the Portuguese translation project and continued through his participation in the NetFIX and NetCAT programs, leading to him becoming a NetBeans Dream Team member.
I would like to thank my wife for all her encouragement and support, in this and the other projects I get involved in.
Halil Karaköse is a freelance software architect who graduated from Işik University Computer Engineering Department in 2005.
He worked in the telecommunications industry as a software developer and software architect for 10 years, including companies such as Turkcell and Ericsson. In 2014, he quit Ericsson to establish his own software consultancy company, kodfarki.com.
He has keen interest in Java tools, which speed up development, such as NetBeans and Intellij IDEA. He loves mouseless driven development.
Mario Pérez Madueño graduated in computer engineering from the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), Spain, in 2010. He is an early adopter of Java tech and advocates agile development methodologies. He has been a member of the NetBeans Community Acceptance Testing (NetCAT) program for many years. He has also contributed as a technical reviewer to Building SOA-Based Composite Applications Using NetBeans IDE 6 and Java EE 7 Development with NetBeans 8, both by Packt Publishing.
I would like to thank my wife, María, for her unconditional help and support in all the projects I get involved in. I would also like to thank Martín and Matías for giving me the strength to go ahead.
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Preface
NetBeans is the only IDE that can be downloaded with Java itself. It provides developers with many cutting-edge features that are not available with all the other IDEs.
This book will teach you how to master the NetBeans IDE. You will learn how to utilize and master the NetBeans IDE to become a proficient developer.
This book is packed with many hints, tips, and time-saving techniques. Reading this book will teach you about the features provided by NetBeans that newcomers to the IDE are not aware of and experienced programmers make extensive use of on a day-to-day basis.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started with NetBeans, describes the different versions of NetBeans that are available to download and shows you how to install NetBeans from an installable package or from the source code.
Chapter 2, Editing Files and Projects, teaches you about the many different facilities available while editing files. You will learn about macros, project groups, the NetBeans windowing system, and much more.
Chapter 3, The NetBeans Developer's Life Cycle, explains how NetBeans helps with the tasks that every developer does on a daily basis—running, debugging, testing, and profiling applications.
Chapter 4, Managing Services, shows you how NetBeans manages external services such as Maven repositories, PaaS, and continuous integration systems.
Chapter 5, Database Persistence, describes the features that NetBeans provides to help write database applications, from both a code-first and data-first perspective.
Chapter 6, Desktop Development, describes the excellent features provided by NetBeans for developing desktop Swing applications.
Chapter 7, Creating the Business Layer, teaches you the tools provided to help developers write the business layers of applications, describing subjects such as EJBs and bean validation.
Chapter 8, Creating the Web Tier, explains the different features available for Java web developers, including details of creating Spring web applications and using CSS preprocessors.
Chapter 9, Creating and Consuming Web Services, explains how NetBeans makes it straightforward to create and consume both RESTful and SOAP-based web services.
Chapter 10, Extending NetBeans, describes how to create NetBeans plugins for those situations where you need to customize the IDE along with the details of how to start using NetBeans as the platform for desktop applications.
What you need for this book
To use this book, you need to download and install the NetBeans IDE on either Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.
You also need to have a modern version of Java (preferably, Java 8). To benefit the most when learning about web services and EJB-related technologies, a Java EE application server is required. The enterprise download bundle of NetBeans is supplied with full support for GlassFish 4 Open Source edition.
Who this book is for
This book is written for Java developers of all the levels who want to gain more knowledge about how their IDE works and learn new techniques to enable them to become more productive when using NetBeans.
A reasonable level of Java and Java EE knowledge is assumed.
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Chapter 1. Getting Started with NetBeans
NetBeans IDE 8 is the official IDE for Java 8, and the only IDE that can be downloaded with official distributions of Java 8.
The latest version, NetBeans IDE 8.0.2, provides tools to allow developers to create desktop, mobile, and web applications using all of the latest Java specifications such as Java SE 8, Java ME 8, and Java EE 7.
This chapter will cover the following topics:
Choosing a download bundle of NetBeans
There are three different installation bundles of NetBeans (which can be downloaded from the NetBeans site) that are relevant to Java developers:
In addition to these three bundles, C/C++ and HTML5 & PHP bundles are also available for download. These bundles are not targeted at Java developers though, so they will not be discussed further in this book.
The Java SE bundle provides the standard NetBeans Platform SDK along with support for Java SE and Java FX developers.
The Java EE bundle contains everything that the SE bundle includes, but adds support for Java EE and HTML5 developers. GlassFish Server Open Source Edition 4.1 and Apache Tomcat 8.0.15 are also included with the Java EE bundle.
The All bundle contains everything that the EE bundle includes, but adds support for C/C++, Groovy, and PHP developers.
Downloading and installing NetBeans
Downloading an installation of NetBeans (Java SE, Java EE, or All) is achieved by selecting the bundle to download and then clicking on the Download button for that bundle, as shown in the preceding screenshot.
All of the examples and screenshots in this book have been created with the Java EE bundle of NetBeans. It is recommended that you use the Java EE download bundle of NetBeans to adhere as closely as possible to the examples in this book.
Note
To install any version of NetBeans 8, the Java JDK Version 7 Update 10 or later, or Java JDK 8 or later, is required. These can be downloaded, if not already installed on your target system, from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads.
Having downloaded the appropriate NetBeans bundle installer for your operating system, you can install NetBeans on your development system. The installation procedure differs slightly for the three main operating systems NetBeans is available for.
For Windows, simply launch the NetBeans installer by double-clicking on the file, netbeans-<xxx>-windows.exe (the exact filename differs depending upon the version and bundle downloaded).
For Mac OS X, double-click on the downloaded file, netbeans-<xxx>-macosx.dmg, to mount the installation device. From there, double-click on the included NetBeans xxx.mpkg file to start the installation (the exact names of the .dmg and .mpkg files vary, depending upon the version and bundle downloaded).
For Linux, NetBeans is installed via a command-line script, so first we must change the permissions of the downloaded file to be executable. From a terminal window, execute the following command:
Tip
Downloading the example code
You can download the example code files from your account at http://www.packtpub.com for all the Packt Publishing books you have purchased. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you. You can also download the code samples from https://github.com/doobrie/masteringnb.
To continue with the installation on Linux, we must now execute the downloaded installer. From a terminal window, execute the following command:
Tip
The installation of the JDK can sometimes be complex on some Linux distributions. Fortunately, NetBeans can be easily executed with an unpacked JDK. If installation of the JDK is complex, simply unpack the JDK files into a <jdk_folder> folder and then execute the installer with the –javahome argument passing in the JDK folder, for example, /netbeans-xxx-linux.sh –javahome <jdk_folder>.
On all of the major operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux), the procedure for installing NetBeans is now very similar. After launching the setup procedure, the installer takes you through the several steps in a wizard style to install NetBeans.
Having agreed to the NetBeans license and selected a folder for installation, the installer displays the Installation Type window:
From here, we can customize NetBeans by clicking on the Customize button.
Note
On Windows and Linux, the preceding screenshot will differ slightly, showing the different application servers that can be installed with NetBeans.
The next screenshot shows the customization options for the Java EE bundle. The options may differ depending upon which bundle you choose to download. For the Java EE bundle, different base components of the NetBeans Platform can be installed, namely Base IDE, Java SE, HTML5, and Java EE.
The Java EE bundle (and also the All bundle) gives the option of installing GlassFish Open Source Edition and Tomcat 8. If either GlassFish or Tomcat is chosen for installation, NetBeans will automatically configure them as servers within the IDE.
Installing other versions of NetBeans
Usually, installing the latest released version of NetBeans is the best course of action. With NetBeans, however, it is possible to download and install the previous versions or even daily builds.
Tip
Be careful with daily builds; they have not been through the rigorous testing procedure that the full release builds had, and may contain bugs!
To download the previous released versions of NetBeans, browse to the NetBeans download page at http://www.netbeans.org/downloads and click on the Archive link in the top-right corner of the page, as shown in the following screenshot:
Tip
For easy access, the previous version of NetBeans is available for downloading by clicking on the appropriate link at the top of the page (version 8.0.1 in the preceding screenshot) rather than clicking on the Archive link and manually selecting a version to install.
From the resultant page, select the previous release you wish to download (for example, NetBeans 7.3) and then click on the Continue button. From here, you can choose whether to download the Java SE, Java EE, or All distributions of NetBeans. The following screenshot shows the previous versions of NetBeans that are currently available for download:
To download the latest daily build of NetBeans, simply click on the Development link in the top-right corner of the NetBeans download page. Again, from the resulting page, select the download bundle (Java SE, Java EE, or All) you require and follow the standard NetBeans installation procedure for your operating system, as outlined previously.
NetBeans user directory
When installing NetBeans, a special directory is created on your computer that stores all the user configuration data for NetBeans; this folder is referred to as a userdir or user directory. This folder contains information on what plugins you have activated in NetBeans, what editor settings you've configured, and much more data. In fact, everything that makes your instance of NetBeans unique to you is stored in this folder.
On Mac OS X, the user directory is located at ~/Library/Application Support/NetBeans.
On Windows, it is located at c:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\NetBeans.
On Linux, the user directory is located at ~/.netbeans.
In the user directory are the separate directories for each different version of NetBeans that you have installed. With this technique, it is therefore possible to have different configurations for different versions of NetBeans that are installed.
In addition to a user directory, NetBeans also makes use of a hidden cache directory, often referred to as a cachedir. The cache directory contains large amount of cache data and thus, it can become a large directory. Due to the information that's written into the cache directory, it must be stored in a different location to the user directory. The contents of the cache directory can be deleted without any settings being lost; it will be recreated the next time NetBeans is executed.
On Mac OS X, the cache directory is located at ~/Library/Caches/NetBeans.
On Windows, the cache directory is located at c:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\NetBeans\Cache.
On Linux, the cache directory is located at ~/.cache/netbeans.
An easy way to find out the location of the user and cache directories is to display the NetBeans About dialog. In this dialog, the location of these directories is given along with the information about the version of NetBeans and Java that are in use:
Updating NetBeans to the latest version
When new versions of NetBeans are released, one simple way to upgrade to the latest version is to download the new version and install it, as shown previously.
When you install NetBeans this way and already have an installation of NetBeans on your computer, NetBeans will ask whether you wish to use the settings from the previous version:
Selecting Yes to this option will import all of the user directory settings from the previous version of NetBeans into the newly installed version. Selecting No will start NetBeans with a clean and empty user directory.
Tip
After installing a new version of NetBeans, it's always a good idea to check whether there are any updates to plugins by going to the plugin manager and selecting Check for Updates.
Obtaining the NetBeans source code
The source code for NetBeans itself is available under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) v1.0 and GNU General Public License (GPL) v2.
It's possible to obtain the source for NetBeans either as a .zip file, containing the entire source for a specific release, by cloning the code from the NetBeans Mercurial repository or by viewing the files from within a browser.
Downloading a zipped archive of the NetBeans source code
If you just want to look at the NetBeans source code and aren't interested in making changes, you can download the source as a .zip archive from the relevant download page for any release. At the bottom of each download page, there is a link to download the source in the ZIP file format, as shown in the following screenshot:
Cloning the NetBeans source code from Mercurial
The alternative to downloading a ZIP archive of the NetBeans source code is to clone the code from the NetBeans Mercurial repository. To perform this operation, you must have the Mercurial client installed on your computer. It can be downloaded for Windows and Mac OS X. For Linux and Mac OS X, it can be installed via the operating system's appropriate package manager, for example, apt-get on Ubuntu or yum install on Fedora. The Mercurial site at http://mercurial.selenic.com provides all the details on how to install Mercurial.
The NetBeans source code can be cloned from Mercurial from either the command line or from within NetBeans. Let's first look at how to achieve this using the command line.
Having installed Mercurial, we are in a good position to clone the NetBeans source code using the hg clone operation.
The NetBeans source code is stored within several branches and tags in the Mercurial repository. The main development for the next version of NetBeans is performed within the main-silver branch. This branch contains the latest development that has been picked up by the latest automatic stable build of NetBeans.
To check out this branch, execute the following command from within a terminal or command prompt:
If this is your first check out of a branch, Mercurial may take a long time to clone the repository. Depending on your computer and network connection, this may take several hours.
Due to the way Mercurial works, hidden files are created on the local filesystem during the first phase of a Mercurial clone operation. No console output is provided during the checkout phase either, so it may appear that the clone operation is not working correctly as there is no visible feedback that the sources are being cloned.
It's possible to tell Mercurial to output status information so that you can see that all is working correctly. This can be especially useful on the first clone of a branch, which can be a lengthy operation. To clone a branch and get status updates output to the console, we must add the --debug parameter onto the clone operation:
After cloning the NetBeans source files from the Mercurial repository, we have many subdirectories within the main-silver directory, as shown in the following screenshot:
Cloning specific versions of NetBeans
In the previous section, we showed how to clone the main-silver branch from the NetBeans Mercurial repository. What if we don't want the latest cutting edge development, but want to look at the source code for a specific version of NetBeans?
Fortunately, each release of NetBeans has the source code tagged in the Mercurial repository, so it's possible to check out any older release going back to December 1999 (this is the first tagged release within Mercurial).
The complete list of tagged releases is available at http://hg.netbeans.org/releases/tags, as shown in the following screenshot:
To view any of these tagged releases, simply check out the releases branch and then change to the specified folder for the requested release.
Cloning the NetBeans source code from within NetBeans
To enable us to use Mercurial from within NetBeans, we must first ensure that NetBeans is configured with the location of the Mercurial executable—hg.exe on Windows and hg on Mac OS X and Linux.
To configure Mercurial within NetBeans, perform the following steps:
Once we've configured the Mercurial support within NetBeans, we can clone the source code repository by performing the following steps:
Tip
Cloning the NetBeans source code in this way via NetBeans does not provide any visual feedback on the progress of the cloning operation. If you wish to see visual feedback so that you know something is happening, consider cloning the repository via the command line, as described earlier.
Browsing the NetBeans source code online
The NetBeans source code is available to browse online at http://hg.netbeans.org/main/file. Viewing the source code this way can be very useful for the casual observer who wants to see how something is done within the NetBeans source code, but does not want to download the entire source code to their computer.
The following screenshot shows the top level of the NetBeans source code in a browser window:
Building NetBeans
Once we've downloaded the source code for NetBeans, we can build it either using the command line or via NetBeans.
To build the NetBeans IDE from the source code, we need to have the following software installed first:
Tip
NetBeans can be built with JDK 8, but additional steps are required for this; we'll see what these are shortly!
Building NetBeans via the command line
To build NetBeans via the command line, open up a terminal or command prompt and change the directory to the directory containing the source code. Executing the ant command will build the source code, downloading any external dependencies that are required:
If you are running JDK 8 instead of 7, you will be presented with an error when attempting to build the source code stating that builds are forbidden when using JDK 8. This error is presented so as not to introduce any Java 8 features into the source code.
If you wish to use JDK 8 to build the code, you can set the permit.jdk8.builds property to true:
Alternatively, if you have both JDK 7 and 8 installed, you can set the nbjdk.home property to point to a valid JDK 7 installation and the build will then complete using the specified JDK 7 instead of JDK 8.
Once you have successfully build NetBeans, you can execute the freshly built instance by executing the ant tryme task:
This will execute the instance of NetBeans that you have just built using <build-location>/nbbuild/testuserdir as the user directory. The actual instance of NetBeans is stored within the <build-location>/nbbuild/netbeans folder.
Alternatively, you can also start the freshly-built instance of NetBeans by executing the netbeans or netbeans.exe commands from within the <build-location>/nbbuild/netbeans/bin directory, either from the command line of Windows / Linux explorer or Mac OSX Finder.
Building NetBeans from within NetBeans
Now that we've seen how to build NetBeans via the command line, let's see how we can build it from within NetBeans itself.
If you cloned the NetBeans source code via the team support in NetBeans, then the NetBeans Build System project will already be opened within NetBeans, ready for building, as shown in the following screenshot:
If you cloned NetBeans via the command line, you will need to open the NetBeans Build System project located within the main-silver/nbbuild directory.
After opening the project, you will see that there are error badges shown against the Ant Tasks and Tests for Ant Tasks project nodes within the Projects window. These errors simply indicate that artifacts needed for the build haven't been downloaded yet; the build process will download the necessary files, and once built, these error badges will no longer appear.
To start building NetBeans, we must first build the necessary Ant tasks that the full build process relies on. To perform this, right-click on the NetBeans Build System project and select the Build option:
Once the build system is completed with no errors (you will see several warnings displayed during the build process, but these can be safely ignored), you can build NetBeans by right-clicking on the NetBeans Build System project and selecting the Build IDE (No ZIP File) option:
If you are using JDK 7, you will see that NetBeans is built correctly after a few minutes of activity.
If you are using JDK 8, you will see a failure message in the NetBeans output window, indicating that the project cannot be built using JDK 8, as shown in the following screenshot:
Since NetBeans provides its own installation of Ant to build projects, if we wish to use JDK 8 to build NetBeans, we must configure the permit.jdk8.builds property before attempting to build.
To configure the Ant properties from within NetBeans, perform the following steps:
Now that we've configured the permit.jdk8.builds property for the internal instance of Ant, we can build the project successfully using JDK 8. This is achieved by right-clicking on the NetBeans Build System project within the Projects window and selecting the Build IDE (No ZIP File) option.
NetBeans configuration
In the previous sections of this chapter, we saw how to choose an installation of NetBeans and install it. We also saw how to download and build NetBeans from its Java source code.
Let's now take a look at the different options that are used to start NetBeans and see how these can be configured.
The configuration options used to start NetBeans are defined as command-line arguments in the netbeans.conf file supplied with a NetBeans distribution.
On Windows and Linux, this file is located within the NetBeans installation directory at <NetBeans Install Dir>/etc/netbeans.conf.
On Mac OS X, this file is hidden due to the way Mac OS X packages are deployed. To view and edit the netbeans.conf file on OS X, right-click on the NetBeans.app executable file and select the Show Package Contents menu option:
The contents of the NetBeans.app package will then be displayed. The netbeans.conf file is located at Contents/Resources.NetBeans/etc/netbeans.conf within the package contents.
This configuration is a simple text file and can be opened with any text editor. In the file, we can see several configuration properties that can be modified to suit your requirements. Let's go through these now and see what options are available.
User and cache directories
Earlier in this chapter, we discussed the NetBeans user and cache directories and what information is stored within them. If you wish to change the user directory for a specific instance of NetBeans (for example, you may want to use a completely fresh user directory or a user directory from a previous installation of NetBeans), this can be achieved by specifying the netbeans_default_userdir parameter. Similarly, the cache directory can be changed by specifying the netbeans_default_cachedir parameter:
Tip
Unless you have a specific reason, you're probably not going to need to change the user and cache directories for NetBeans.
NetBeans default options
The NetBeans default startup options are probably the most likely of the command-line arguments that you'll need to change for NetBeans. These options are specified by the netbeans_default_options parameter:
