Gradle Plugin for NetBeans IDE 7.2

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Gradle Plugin for NetBeans IDE 7.2

Attila Kelemen

Aug. 12, 12 · Java Zone ·

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I ( https://github.com/kelemen) have been (and I still do) use Maven for development of Java code. My main reason for using Maven for development is its great NetBeans IDE support, so that I don't need to maintain IDE project files separately.

As much as I like this support in the Maven world, I feel the limits of Maven every day I use it.

Since I first saw the Gradle project, I knew that this is the least that I've always wanted from a build tool. So I started to look for NetBeans IDE support for Gradle. To my sadness there is only support for Eclipse and Idea. Aside from the fact that I prefer to use NetBeans IDE, I felt the IDE support to be limited for Gradle, (although the last time I read about Gradle support in IDEA, it seemed promising).

Not long ago, I came across Geertjan's plugin and I felt that that writing such plugin is possible without enormous effort. So I downloaded his sources and started to analyze them and rewrite the plugin, so that it works with most Gradle scripts. There are many new features available in my version, such as these:

slow tasks are done in a background thread
source paths are retrieved from the model
"test single"

Screenshots:

Project menus:
Project dependencies:
Project debug test:

However, I removed subprojects and now each project needs to be opened manually, it is more efficient if you don't plan to edit all the subprojects; the drawback is that you cannot open projects without a build.gradle.

The main problem with Gradle daemon performance is that on the first project load, Gradle downloads every single dependency. After that, I found the performance acceptable (especially after I implemented caching of already loaded projects). I have tested it with a relatively large project (>60 subprojects, lots of Java code): It took me about 2 minutes to load the project which seems ok to me for such an enormous project. Other than the project loading, the performance depends on NetBeans which is good.

How to try it

There is currently no compiled version of the plugin, so you have to compile it for yourself, if you want to try it.

You can clone/download the sources from here:

https://github.com/kelemen/netbeans-gradle-project

After downloading the sources, open the project in NetBeans IDE.

There generally two approaches you could consider:

Generate the .nbm file (by choosing "Create NBM" in the project's popup) and install the plugin as you would do with any other third-party plugin.
"Run" the project. This is the safest thing to do because this will start a new NetBeans instance with a brand new user directory (in the build folder). This way your own NetBeans installation will be unaffected.

Help I would appreciate

I'm pretty new to the NetBeans APIs (i.e., this is my first time using them), so someone might help me with the project dependencies (possibly Mavenize the plugin). And if it is possible, allow for the plugin to rely on a user specified installation of Gradle (there is some risk in it because Gradle does not seem to be very backward compatible).

If you happen to know the Project API in NetBeans well, that could prove really helpful, so that I don't need to spend days figuring out, how things need to be done in the API.

How to contact me

You can contact me through my GitHub account: https://github.com/kelemen

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Gradle Plugin for NetBeans IDE 7.2