I have used several IDEs over the last couple of year to include Eclipse, IDEA and NetBeans . They all have their strengths and weakness and for the projects I have been working on, I ended up switching around quite a bit. With the recent announcement of the new Netbeans 6.0, I wanted to revisit it's capabilities and see what was new, particularly with its maven integration.
While the Netbeans installer was downloading, I started to search for what plugins I would need to do maven->Netbeans or Netbeans ->maven project conversions. Most of what I found looked outdated and didn't look easy to use. With a little stumbling around I found out that the Mevenide project does now support Netbeans 6.0 (this is not apparent on their Netbeans project page). So I installed the Mevenide Maven2 plugin.
And was blown away!
There is no conversion of project types from maven->NetBeans . It just works natively. File > Open Project and browse for your existing maven project. Bingo.
I actually started by opening a parent project, <packaging>pom</packaging>, thinking that the Mavenide wouldn't know what to do with a multi module project, but it just worked, too! It showed me the project files, libraries, test libraries and the modules that this parent included. Too cool.
So then I double clicked my war module name hoping for the best and was not disappointed. It opened the war project in the project pane and I was off and running.
Right click on the project name to run the more common maven goals from right inside NetBeans. To run custom goals, you can create a Custom > Goals... goal that you can use to chain together whatever goals you want for a maven execution. This is the only thing I did that actually created a custom file on my filesystem. Everything else was native.
How's that for a slice of fried gold?So, here's a big high five to to the Mevenide team on a job well done! (And update your NetBeans project page to highlight that it works in Netbeans 6.0. This is important news to advertise!).
