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What is an NBM?

An NBM file is a NetBeans module packaged for delivery via the web. The principal differences between it and a module JAR are:

• It is compressed
• It can contain more than one JAR file - modules can package any libraries or other files they use into their NBM
• It contains metadata NetBeans will use to display information about it in the update center, such as the manifest contents, the license, etc.
• NBMs may be signed for security purposes

NBM files are just ZIP files with a special extension, which use the JDK's mechanism for signing JARs. Unless you're doing something unusual, you will not need to worry about the contents of NBMs - just let the standard Ant task for NBM creation take care of it for you. For those interested in gory details, read on.

Structure of an NBM

Below is an example of the contents of one - this is from the hexedit_integration module in contrib, which packages up an external library as well:

Info/info.xml

Metadata - this file is generated by the standard NBM build target, so if you use NetBeans support for creating modules, you should not need to do anything special to create it. This info is used by the IDE to figure out if a module the user is installing is newer or older, than an existing one, whether or not its dependencies can be satisfied, etc.

META-INF/MANIFEST.MF

The manifest - usually nothing of interest here, it is just generated because NBMs are created the same way that JARs are. May point to a signature for the NBM.

netbeans/....

Contents to be unpacked to some cluster in the NetBeans installation (or the user directory).

netbeans/config/Modules/org-netbeans-modules-hexeditor.xml

The module XML file used at runtime to discover modules. Indicates whether the module is autoload, etc.

netbeans/modules/org-netbeans-modules-hexeditor.jar

The actual module JAR.

netbeans/modules/ext/hexedit.jar

A library this module uses and includes.

Runtime module XML metadata

The org-netbeans-modules-hexeditor.xml runtime metadata file looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE module PUBLIC "-//NetBeans//DTD Module Status 1.0//EN"
                        "http://www.netbeans.org/dtds/module-status-1_0.dtd">
<module name="org.netbeans.modules.hexeditor">
    <param name="autoload">false</param>
    <param name="eager">false</param>
    <param name="enabled">true</param>
    <param name="jar">modules/org-netbeans-modules-hexeditor.jar</param>
    <param name="release">1</param>
    <param name="reloadable">false</param>
    <param name="specversion">1.0</param>
</module>

Module installation metadata - Info.xml

The Info/Info.xml file that NetBeans uses to figure out if it can install a module, dependencies, etc. looks like this (it also contains the license that the user will agree to to install the module from the update center):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE module PUBLIC "-//NetBeans//DTD Autoupdate Module Info 2.3//EN"
                        "http://www.netbeans.org/dtds/autoupdate-info-2_3.dtd">
<module codenamebase="org.netbeans.modules.hexeditor"
        homepage="http://contrib.netbeans.org/"
        distribution="http://...../org-netbeans-modules-hexeditor.nbm"
        license="standard-nbm-license.txt"
        downloadsize="0"
        needsrestart="false"
        moduleauthor=""
        releasedate="2005/08/29"
>
  <manifest OpenIDE-Module="org.netbeans.modules.hexeditor/1"
            OpenIDE-Module-Display-Category="Infrastructure"
            OpenIDE-Module-Implementation-Version="050829"
            OpenIDE-Module-Long-Description="Sample module hexeditor providing HexEdit"
            OpenIDE-Module-Module-Dependencies="org.openide.filesystems > 6.2, ..."
            OpenIDE-Module-Name="hexeditor"
            OpenIDE-Module-Requires="org.openide.modules.ModuleFormat1"
            OpenIDE-Module-Short-Description="Sample hexeditor module"
            OpenIDE-Module-Specification-Version="1.0"
  />
  <license name="standard-nbm-license.txt"><![CDATA[
                Sun Public License Notice
....
]]></license>
</module>

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Applies to: NetBeans 6.5 and above