Ever since IDE's were invented, IDE vendors had been selling us code that they wrote to build their IDE, thinking that we might get some reuse out of them. At first they are called class libraries. Then they become application frameworks. Now they are calling them platforms.
I liked Tom's exposition style a lot. I think inviting is the word to describe it. Half way into the article, I wanted to reinstall NetBeans, which I uninstalled 44 days ago and try out Tom's examples, which are temporarily available here.
I did have a few problems:
When I ran ant tryme, and could not find some of the classes in the org.apache.tools.ant package. (If you think about it, this is almost comical.) Adding /usr/share/java/ant-1.6.2.jar to my CLASSPATH environment variable won't help. I have to specify it on the command line using -Dant.jar=/usr/share/java/ant-1.6.2.jar for the example to proceed.
The sample tries to modify or write files in the NetBeans installation directory, which under my installation scheme is not writable. I usually don't like it when programs want to mess up a perfectly good installation. But for Tom there is nothing that a little chmod 777 won't fix.
In the step where Tom says to edit nbbuild/user.build.properties he really means nbbuild/user.cluster.properties.
Other than these, the introduction is a smooth sail. Look what I did:
Now that I'm talking about NetBeans, I should point out that the promised change of the click through license on the NetBeans download site still hasn't happened. According to Tim Boudreau in a comment made 24 days ago:
Turns out we have to do something or other for all the historical releases as well, so we've been iterating with the lawyers on clear, unambiguous text for those. I know that sounds Dilbert-esque, but lawyers are paid to be paranoid. I made a commitment, and what I said will happen will happen. I will post a follow-up here as soon as it does.
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