ARCHIVE: Using NetBeans 4.1 on JPRT

In starting the JPRT project I wanted to force myself to use NetBeans 4.1, it seemed like the right project to do this with, and I need to get some real-world experience with Netbeans. The existing PRT source base is 99% Java with a Makefile to build it and lots of small shell scripts used on the Solaris side. I haven't gotten into the setup of a PRT system, but will soon since the hardware for this project has shown up, so we are literally weeks away from having the hardware and OS installed on the basic system, just no PRT/JDK software. The current PRT source consists of over 200 Java source files and over 20,000 lines of Java code.

So How Does the basic PRT Work?

Essentially there is one controlling PRT instance on a Solaris machine that manages the disk array and the archive storage (the driver or prtd), and one client PRT instance on every client machine. In my case that's 8 client machines: 4 for Solaris (Sparc, SparcV9, i586, x64), 2 for Linux (i586, x64), and 2 Windows (i586, x64). Although I will allow for IA64 machines, we don't use them anymore and I have no plans to add them to the JPRT system.

The existing PRT system is heavily slanted toward Hotspot and VM building and testing. It does a good job at Hotspot and it appeared to allow for JDK builds in a primitive way with some hooks, but over time those hooks aren't worth much, so the plan is to re-write and re-structure the part of PRT that builds and tests Hotspot to be more generic. The Hotspot details go as far as it knowing the exact layout of the makefile build results, names of all built files, locations of generated sources, and even the location of some source files in the source trees. The running of make is different for each platform, I'd like to change it to be more consistent and use the newer generic hotspot/make/Makefile file and it's export directory.

Netbeans Usage

Using Netbeans 4.1

To create a project with existing sources was easy, just pointed it at the 'src' directory, and added the jdom.jar Library file. You may need to change the source level to 1.5. Once the project is setup, it should build just fine. This worked the first time for me, no problems.

Details

Keep in mind that some of this was work done on the Mac with a one button trackpad (while I sat in my comfy LazyBoy chair), and other times I used the Mac at my desktop with a three button mouse. Using the three-button mouse was better, and my requests for buttons was often due to the one button trackpad, although having to pull down menus and select when I could just click on a button was an issue. I assume someone will tell me how to customize Netbeans to have my own buttons, which I would like to know, but customizing Netbeans when I'm running different instances in various places means I would need to co-ordinate my Netbeans customizations (e.g. on the Mac and on my Ultra60, and on my Windows desktop I use occasionally), which I don't really want to do.

I still find some of the Netbeans UI confusing and in places non-intuitive, but it's starting to win me over. I haven't used the debugger yet. There were some issues, but overall things worked pretty well.