Appendix A. Importing an Eclipse Project into NetBeans IDE

• Getting the Eclipse Project Importer

• Choosing Between Importing with and Importing without Project Dependencies

• Importing an Eclipse Project and Preserving Project Dependencies

• Importing an Eclipse Project and Ignoring Project Dependencies

• Handling Eclipse Project Discrepancies

• Handling Eclipse Project Reference Problems

IF YOU HAVE PROJECTS THAT YOU HAVE STARTED DEVELOPING IN ECLIPSE, you can easily migrate those projects to NetBeans IDE. The Eclipse Project Importer automates the importing of Eclipse projects by processing the Eclipse project metadata and mapping it directly to new NetBeans projects. For NetBeans IDE 5.0, this module works for Eclipse 3.0 and 3.1 projects and is available through the NetBeans Update Center.

The NetBeans Eclipse Project Importer not only identifies and automatically fixes Eclipse project discrepancies, but also identifies erroneous Eclipse project references and suggests corrective actions to resolve them once the project has been imported into NetBeans IDE. The project importer is also very flexible, because you can select projects from an Eclipse workspace where project dependencies are automatically identified and marked for importing if such project dependencies exist. In addition, the project importer lets you select individual Eclipse projects for importing into NetBeans IDE without specifying the location of the Eclipse workspace.

This appendix describes how to import projects both from Eclipse workspaces and from specific Eclipse projects.

If you find the project importer is not importing your Eclipse projects as well as you had hoped, you can use a NetBeans IDE project template to create a project using your sources from your Eclipse project. Choose File | New Project in NetBeans IDE and select the "with Existing Sources" template from the appropriate project category (General, Web, or Enterprise).

If your Eclipse project uses a sophisticated Ant script (build.xml file), you might want to use one of the "with Existing Ant Script" project templates. See Chapter 16 for more information on working with projects based on an existing Ant script.