Copylibs and copylibstask.jar NetBeans 6.5RC1

Just a quick one. I currently have several projects which all rely on 1 project as a global library so the same jar versions are used across the board.

This was working fine until 6.5RC1 came along. NetBeans would seemingly randomly create a CopyLibs folder with a copylibtask.jar within my library project. Not accidentally committing this to SVN has been a pain.

Seems it’s all down to using the embedded ant. Since I’ve changed this to use the external ant, the problem has disappeared (so far! – will update this if it reoccurs).

Fix:

Tools -> Options -> Miscellaneous -> Ant -> Change Ant Home to point to an external ant (preferably 1.7.1)

Converting Ant to Maven in NetBeans

After a good couple of days spent converting ant projects over to maven, here is what I consider the easiest method. This is using NetBeans 6.5rc1 but probably works in 6.1.

Here are the steps for converting an ant project to a maven project in NetBeans.
This presumes your ~/.m2/settings.xml is already set up (not shown here for security purposes) and you have installed the Netbeans maven2 plugin:

1. Open ant project
2. Create new maven project using the “Maven Quickstart Archetype”
3. Properties -> Sources -> Change to 1.6
4. pom.xml -> Add distribution management

<distributionManagement>
  <repository>
    <id>nexus</id>
    <name>Internal Releases</name>
    <url>YourInternalReleaseURL</url>
  </repository>
</distributionManagement>

5. Files tab -> src/main -> add folder “resources”. This will create an “Other Sources/resources” entry in the project view
6. Delete existing source and test package stubs
7. Copy java sources and test sources across from ant project
8. Move all config xml files (such as applicationContext.xml) over to “Other Sources/resources”
9. If you have any hibernate .hbm.xml files, create a folder structure under “Other Sources/resources” identical to the package structure, and copy the files to there
10. Resolve dependencies. The easiest way to do this is go through red-underlined classes, copy the missing required classname, right-click the libraries node and hit “Find Dependency”
11. If a dependency is purely for a test class, add “<scope>test</scope>” to reduce the resulting jar filesize
12. mvn install or deploy

If the ant project exposes a WebService:
1. Add the following plugin to the pom.xml:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
  <artifactId>jaxws-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <goals>
        <goal>wsimport</goal>
      </goals>
      <configuration>
        <wsdlUrls>
          <wsdlUrl>yourWSDLExposedUrl</wsdlUrl>
        </wsdlUrls>
        <packageName>yourWSClientPackageName</packageName>
        <sourceDestDir>${basedir}/src/main/java</sourceDestDir>
      </configuration>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

2. Change the wsdl location and packageName as necessary. Without the sourceDestDir, the generated sources live under target/ and code completion won’t work. Setting the package name to the same package as the ws-client solves this. Compilation works either way.

Threads

And first, a little something:

As one of you
And one of me

Two threads so bare, you’d hardly see.

–

Two steps entwine, two ryhmes sublime
As yours are mine, your eyes divine

–

Friends, I’m sure, of which I’m certain
Cannot draw the final curtain