Setting up Netbeans 6.1 with Maven 2 support

This tutorial describes the installation procedure for the newest version of Netbeans (as of June 2008) with support for Maven 2. If instead you would like to use the older (but still supported) Netbeans 5.5/Maven 1 combination, see https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/ilc/Installing+Netbeans+with+Maven+Support.

It is assumed you already have a functioning Java development environment (>=1.5) on your computer. See Installing Java if you haven't done this yet.

Installing Netbeans 6.1

The download page for Netbeans 6.1 is located at http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.1/final/. For org.lcsim, the Java SE version is probably the one you want. Download the installer and install Netbeans.

Enabling Maven

Maven support is available for Netbeans 6.1 as a plugin. Fire up Netbeans and locate the Tools menu. Click on the item "Plugins." Select the tab labelled "Available Plugins" and find and install the Maven plugin. Netbeans will probably have to restart to complete the installation.

If you would like to use Maven from the command line, it's easiest to obtain it from http://maven.apache.org/. Note that for Maven 2, the command is mvn rather than maven.

Building GeomConverter / lcsim...

...If you already have a current CVS version of GeomConverter/lcsim on the machine

Once the Maven plugin is enabled, it should be possible to use File -> Open Project to open the lcsim and GeomConverter folders as Maven projects (the project folders should have a special icon). You should be able to build the projects by right clicking on them in the project explorer and selecting Build.

...If this is a fresh install.

You can use Netbeans's built in CVS client to checkout GeomConverter and org.lcsim as follows:

1. Versioning->CVS->Checkout
2. For the CVS root field, enter ":pserver:anonymous@cvs.freehep.org:/cvs/lcd" (without the quotes). Leave the password field blank and press next.
   
   
   
3. For the module enter "GeomConverter" (without the quotes). Leave the Branch field blank. You can specify the local folder where the project files will be located (they will be in a toplevel folder called GeomConverter, so don't worry about spamming).
   
   
   
4. Press finish, wait for the files to download, and agree to open the project.
5. GeomConverter should appear in the project tree on the left. Right click on it and tell it to build. This will take a while as it will have to download a whole bunch of dependencies.
6. Repeat, but this time, enter "lcsim" for the module rather than "GeomConverter"