Meng Yan ( 孟岩 )’s Weblog

These days, I have investigated the Netbeans RCP(Rich Client Platform), and developed some module on it. Netbeans is not only the Java IDE, Netbeans.org has provided netbeans platform as an application runtime for build rich desktop application, just like eclipse platform. The “plugin” here is called “Module”. Every module is a “nbm” file that could be loaded by their module class loader. The module’s information is stored in the manifest file in the Module file.

The netbeans platform has been developed since 1999 when NetBeans 3.0 was rewriten, and the latest version is 4.0. With it, developer could focus on the business logic and NetBeans platform will provide ways to handle module management, UI management, preference management and etc. and it provides rich APIs to help the developer to do customization. see more at http://www.netbeans.org/products/platform.

Like Eclipse, there’s also the extension concept in Netbeans Module Runtime, moreover it is based on a J2SE standard for extension registration – META-INF/services. You can checkout the detail information from here. And NetBeans Service registry is also based on J2SE standard extension mechanism (http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/jar/jar.html#Service%20Provider).

Netbeans’s Module runtime support dynamic module register/unregister/update feature (deploy the module on the fly), which are not supported in Eclipse 2.1(But have already been supported by Eclipse 3.0 using OSGi standard). And Netbeans RCP provide the module update center to help the developer to manage the modules.

After the release of Netbeans 4.0, most of the IDE related things have already been striped out from netbeans platform, and the core size of netbeans platform core has been downsized.

Netbeans has a long history, the story is very interesting, also, there’s many applications that already take the advantage of Netbean RCP, you can check out detail information here.

Currently, there’s no module development enviroment in netbeans, so the module development work is a little hard, and the beginning learn curve is a little higher. Hope we will get the “MDE”(so called ) in the later version. here’s the road map of Netbeans.

Then, how to develop a module using netbeans platform? From my experience, it’s not so hard.

I have ever developed a little tool called MP3 Renamer before. Because I have many music files in my laptop, but many of them are called “1.mp3″ , “music.mp3″. I build this little tool to parse the tag information from the mp3 files and rename the file name to “Author — Songname.mp3″.

I decide to change the stand alone application to a netbeans module to test the Netbeans RCP. Here I’d like to share my experience with you.

1) What we needed

• JDK 1.4.2 or above (http://java.sun.com)
• Netbeans RCP (http://www.netbeans.info/downloads/download.php?a=b&p=2), you can download the binary version or even the source to build one, all up to you.
• Apache Ant (http://ant.apache.org/)

2) Install the Netbeans RCP

After unzip the netbeans zip file to a directory (“/home/elan/netbeans” in my case), make a user preference directory such as “elan” in the netbeans directory. Then, type “/home/elan/netbeans/platform4/lib/nbexec –userdir /home/elan/elan to test if it works. If it works, congratulations, we have already installed the netbeans RCP and can build our own module base on it.

3) Create MP3 Renamer Module

First, we should build the module working enviroment. Here’s the structure of the Mp3 renamer dir:

Source files are all put into “src” and third party library files are put into “lib” directory.

After that, we need to edit the manifest file (“manifest.mf”). The content of mine is :

The layer file (“com/vvworkshop/shareware/mp3rename/resources/layer.xml“) describe the extension point and the Bundle file (“com/vvworkshop/shareware/mp3rename/Bundle.properties“) store the localized string of our module.

You can modify the file according to your case.

Ok, let’s take a look at the layer file:

It extends the netbeans system menu and will insert our own one into the “View” sub menu. The Action that the menu connected with is “com.vvworkshop.shareware.mp3rename.Mp3RenamerAction”. Let’s take a look at the source file of this action.

The most important functions are “performAction” and “getName“. Function “getName” will return the menu name, and function “performAction” will provide the real action when the user click the menu. And in the Bundle.properties file, there’s one line “SLC_title=MP3 Renamer” , so, the menu name will be called”Mp3 Renamer”. “performAction” provides the action, in my case, in this function the MP3 Renamer main panel will dock into the netbeans panel.

Another important file is “build.xml”, we can use Ant to compile, archive, and build “nbm” file. The file is a little long, I’d like to abstract some important slice from my ant script:

Some property

How to archive the jar file

besides the archive work, we also need to create the module xml file. And in order to build it, we also need a jar file named as “nbantext.jar”, it can be acquired from the NetBeans IDE binary.

How to create the “nbm” file

You can just copy this target to your build file and change the propertiy value.

4) Test the Module

So far, after build the nbm file, we can test our module. First, you should use the netbeans update center (“Tools”->”Update Center”->”Install Manually Downloaded Modules”) to install the new module.

After install the module, you could click the “View” menu, we can see a sub menu named “Mp3 renamer”, after click it, the Mp3 Renamer panel will popup. So, you can see, the netbeans module development is easy, and with the help of module development enviroment in the future version, the development work will be easier. Here, I cannot give you too much detail information because it will be too long, if you are interested in it, you can send email to me and ask for the demo source file.

Enjoy~

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2005 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Other. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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