How to check out and then build Felix with in Netbeans

In this how-to we go over the process of checking out and then building Felix from source all from with in the NetBeans IDE.

Required Software:

1. NetBeans 6.1 - You can get NetBeans Here
2. Subversion command line client - NetBeans uses the subversion command line client for its subversion integration. You can get the subversion command line client here or if you are working on a Unix machine it will most likely be in your os's package repository.
3. NetBeans Maven plugin - You can install this from with in NetBeans by selecting Tools->Plugins then choose the Maven plugin from the Available Plugins tab and press the Install button on the bottom of the dialog. For a good introduction of what you can do with this plugin see MavenBestPractices on the NetBeans wiki.
4. Maven - You will also need a local install of maven to complete this how-to as well. You can find maven here
   
   

   Why do we need maven

   The NetBeans Maven plugin comes prepackaged with Maven so why do we need a local copy of Maven? The version of Maven that comes prepackaged with NetBeans is 2.1-SNAPSHOOT which currently has issues building Felix so we need a copy of the current release version of Maven installed locally so we can use that instead.

Check out Felix

1) From NetBeans main menu select Versioning->Subversion->Checkout as shown in Figure1

2) Now we need to fill the checkout dialog box. For this dialog box all we need to do is fill in the Repository URL (See below for a what this should be). Once you have set the Repository URL you can press the Next button. See Figure2 for what the dialog should look like when you are done.

Repository URL: http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/felix/trunk

3) In the next panel of the checkout dialog box we need to set where we want to put the source code as well as some parameters that will get passed to the subversion client.

• Repository Folder(s) - This should be set for you but if it is not it should be "felix/trunk"
• Repository Revision - Leave this one blank. NOTE: If you want to check out a particular version of felix you can put the revision number here and that revision will be checked out. For our purposes here we want to get the latests revision.
• Skip "trunk" check box - Check this. This option means that the source code will be checked out into the root of the folder/directory that we supply.
• Local Folder - This is the location that the source code will be checked out to. You can press the browse button to select a directory. NOTE: If you need to create a sub directory pick the parent then in the edit box add it to the path. It will be created for you during the check out.
• Scan for NetBeans Projects after checkout check box - You can either uncheck this or leave it checked. Either way NetBeans will not open any of the projects because there are approximately 183 projects in the Felix source tree. Later we will pick the specific project we need for compiling Felix.

Once you have filled in the second panel of the checkout dialog press the "Finish" button at the bottom of the dialog. See Figure3 for how the dialog should look.

4) It may take a while for the check out to complete. If you want to see what is happening take a look at the output window at the bottom of the NetBeans window. If you don't see it select Window->Output->Output to make it display. You should see something like what is shown in Figure4

5) If you left the "Scan for NetBeans Projects after checkout" check box checked you will see the dialog in Figure5 when subversion finished checking out Felix. For now just press the cancel button.

6) This concludes the section on checking out the Felix source code.

Building Felix

In this section we will be going over how to build Felix from within NetBeans.