Question

I would like to develop a plugin for Netbeans 6.8 but I can’t find enough tutorials / resources / articles for the same. The only decent reference link I could find was http://platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/nbm-google.html and being new to this, I find that insufficient.

I’m looking for either links for better references, or if you have done such a thing before I would love to hear about your experiences.

Thanks,

Answer 1

Here is the ‘front door’ to the on-line documentation for the NetBeans RCP. That will give you access to a lot of resources that discuss the foundations of the NetBeans IDE (which is built on the platform).

There is documentation for the APIs associated with the NetBeans IDE, version 6.8. This documentation is for modules that have ‘public’ APIs.

You will notice that many of the NetBeans javadocs have info about an ‘api’ package and an ‘spi’ package. Typically, a plugin developer will create implementations of one or more of the interfaces that are found in the ‘spi’ package. The ‘api’ package usually has the definition of the interfaces that a developer would use to access data from the IDE.

You should subscribe to a couple of the NetBeans mailing lists. If you need to ask questions about using the NetBeans RCP APIs, you should subscribe to the [e-mail] list. If you need to ask questions that are focused on the development of extensions to the NetBeans IDE, you should subscribe to the [e-mail] list. There are a couple benefits to subscribing to the lists:

1. You get to ask folks that have developed the features and APIs of the RCP and IDE about things that you have trouble with.
2. You get to get to see the ‘pulse’ of the project and find out what is coming.