Geertjan Wielenga - Beginning NetBeans IDE: for Java developers

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Geertjan Wielenga 2015

Geertjan Wielenga Beginning NetBeans IDE 10.1007/978-1-4842-1257-8_1

1. Installing and Setting Up

Geertjan Wielenga 1

(1)

Amsterdam Area, Netherlands

NetBeans is the best IDE to start with when learning Java, because of its out-of-the-box experience. A simple click-through installation procedure provides all the tools you need, with a friendly and intuitive user interface to develop all kinds of Java applications.

Zoran Sevarac,

assistant professor at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and founder of Neuroph

In this chapter, I introduce you to NetBeans IDE, after which I provide you with the information needed to get the IDE up and running. Youll see that the process is simple and soon youll be able to work through a basic scenario, as described in , which guides you through the workflow of programming in Java with the IDE.

What Is NetBeans IDE?

The IDE is a 100% free and open source development environment that helps you create different kinds of software applications. In the context of this book, we will focus specifically on the IDE as an environment for developing Java applications. The IDE provides support for all types of Java applications, helping you develop projects that use all the Java technologiesJava SE, Java EE, Embedded, and Cloud.

The IDE is modular and can be extended via plugins. The features included in the download bundles that you will be introduced to in this chapter are extensive enough that you will not need to use any plugins, at least not initially.

Java is the language in which the IDE is written. It can run on operating systems on which the Java Development Kit (JDK) has been installed. Installers that guide you through the process of installing and setting up the IDE are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. The IDE can also be downloaded as a ZIP or TAR file, which can be useful if you want to use the IDE on an operating system for which no installer is provided.

For the purposes of this book, the IDE exists to simplify the development process of Java applications. Without the IDE, the edit-compile-debug cycle inherent in Java development is cumbersome and error prone. To overcome and help in the development process, the IDE integrates tools for these activities. Specifically, the IDE does the following:

• Notifies you of problems in your code and highlights them in the Java Editor.
• Assists you in coding quickly and efficiently using the editors features such as code templates, code completion, and hints in the Java Editor.
• Shows documentation for classes and methods while you type in the Java Editor.
• Includes visual navigation assistance, including the Navigator and editor features such as code folding, together with many keyboard shortcuts to speed up coding.
• Provides hyperlinks in the Output window to let you jump from compilation errors to lines in the Java Editor where the related problematic code is found.
• Helps to manage changes across your application code by managing references to names of packages, classes, and methods throughout your code. When you move or rename code, the IDE finds related code affected by your changes and lets you control whether the related code should automatically be changed.
• Comes with a debugger and profiler that work together to help you identify problems in your code quickly and easily. As your code runs, you can step through it and set breakpoints, instead of needing to add print statements. The profiler lets you identify bottlenecks in your code, such as areas causing performance problems and deadlocks.
• Lets you integrate your development workflow into a single environment, including checking your code into and out of version control systems, such as Git, Mercurial, and Subversion.

Advantages of the IDE

Just like other development environments, the IDE consists of a set of editors and graphical tools for efficiently coding and quickly detecting problems. The IDE guides you from the point of project creation, through the editing process, to compilation, debugging, and the packaging of your applications.

While using the IDE, you can use its free and cutting-edge set of tools and features, without the disadvantages that you might associate with moving your code to a single integrated development environment. For example, the IDE is unique in that the project architectures and build structures it supports, based on Maven, Gradle, or Ant, are also based on open standards. Other IDEs enforce IDE-specific structures and processes on you, with proprietary metadata and other files, so that you need to change your application architecture when you want to run it outside the other IDEs. With NetBeans IDE, you can be sure that the work you do compiles and runs outside the IDE exactly as it does within it. This is especially convenient when you are using continuous build servers such as Hudson or Jenkins, as well as when you are using Maven as your build tool.

The IDE is consistently aligned with and even ahead of the curve in providing support for new and evolving software standards. When you are working with Java, you can be sure that the latest specifications and techniques are supported by the IDE and that all the assistance you get from it is based on the most recent standards. For example, the latest language featuresin particular those that relate to lambdas and functional operations that have been introduced in Java SE 8are supported in the IDEs Java Editor by means of refactoring tools, batch analyzers, Java hints, and syntax coloring.

New users of the IDE tend to be surprised by the array of features that are available out of the box, that is, without requiring you to install any additional plugins. The IDE has a full-featured Java EE platform development environment built-in, again, out of the box. The editor, debugger, profiler, and project support available for Java SE applications are also available, without any setup or configuration, for Java EE development.

Downloading the IDE

You can download the IDE from the NetBeans.org web site:

http://www.netbeans.org/downloads/index.html

You can also download it, together with the JDK, from the Oracle.com web site:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads

Its best to use the latest available version of the JDK and IDE. At the time of this writing, the latest version of the IDE is NetBeans IDE 8.1. NetBeans IDE 8.1 is used throughout this book, and the assumption is that you are using NetBeans IDE 8.1 while working through this book.

Figure shows the download bundles available on NetBeans.org.

Figure 1-1.

NetBeans IDE download bundles

The NetBeans IDE download bundles contain the features described in Table . For the instructions in this book, you need the Java EE download bundle. In general, when you are learning the Java language, the Java SE download bundle is all you need because it includes the Java Editor, debugger, and profiler. However when you are employed in an organization as a Java developer, you normally create applications that use the Java EE platform, since Java EE is an integrated solution for creating complex enterprise Java web applications. The Java EE download bundle provides tools that are helpful when working with the Java EE platform. In short, the Java EE download bundle encompasses the full set of Java features that the IDE provides and is the download bundle you should download and install when working through this book.

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