Building and Trying Out a Plug-in Module

After you have coded your plug-in module, you can build it and try it out within the IDE instance where you are working. The IDE uses an Ant script (build.xml file) to build plug-in modules. The Ant script is created when you create the module project. You can change the Ant script manually. It is located within the Important Files node. You can also use the Project Properties dialog box to modify settings in the Ant script.

You set and modify the plug-in module's dependencies, versioning, and packaging information in the Project Properties dialog box. Right-click the module project's node in the Projects window and choose Properties to access the Project Properties dialog box.

The build script that you use to build the plug-in module is called via a menu item in the IDE.

To build a plug-in module:

1. In the Projects window, right-click the node of the module project you want to build.

2. Choose Build Project.

After you build a plug-in module, you can try it out from inside the IDE. When you run the plug-in module from the IDE, you can specify that the run process should start another copy of the IDE with the plug-in module loaded in it.

To try out a plug-in module:

1. In the Projects window, right-click the node of the module project you want to build.

2. Choose Install/Reload in Target Platform to load the plug-in module in a freshly started copy of the IDE.

After developing the plug-in module further, you can repeat the process above, because when you try out the plug-in module, the IDE unloads the previous version of the plug-in module and replaces it with the version you are currently trying out.

You can debug a plug-in module just as you would any other application in NetBeans IDE, by simply selecting Debug Main Project from the Run menu or by right-clicking on a module project in the Projects window and choosing Debug Project. The same is true for profiling.