NewAndNoteworthy in Milestone 4 of Mobility Pack

Mobility Deployment Manager

In the Mobility Deployment Manager it is possible to create several instances of each deployment type (for example several Ftp server connections).

In the Deployment category of project properties there is a new combo to select the deployment instance prepared in Mobility Deployment Manager. Some of the deployment options are still project-specific (for example path on the Ftp server) so they are customizable in project properties.

Flexible Build System and Project Customizer

The buildsystem of NetBeans Mobility was completely changed. Now it supports various plugins that can register their customizers and build script fragments. For the standard set of features there is no visible change however when installed an aditional plugins - the magic things begin to happen.

Several Experimental Plugins

The main reason to introduce these experimental plugins was to demonstrate and verify the capabilities of the new flexible build system. These plugins are not a fixed part of NetBeans Mobility, they are installable separatelly as NBMs, and their sources are open as the rest of NetBeans and Mobility.

RIM BlackBerry Plugin

This experimental plugin should completelly replace the textual guide how to integrate BlackBerry JDE into NetBeans Mobility.

The plugin teaches NetBeans Mobility how to detect RIM BlackBerry JDE 4.1.0 and 4.2.0, how to build, execute, and debud the application on the emulator, and how to deploy the application on the real BlackBerry device.

All this functionality is transparent for project configurations so each of you project configuration can use different emulator - no matter if BlackBerry or not.

The RIM BlackBerry JDE is now detected and installed automatically.

The debugging works instantly.

And the new deployment plugin delivers your application directly to your device.

Java SE Plugin

This is another proof-of-concept plugin that verifies capabilities of the new build system. Main purpose of this plugin is to allow mobile project library to build one of its project configuration agains Java SE bootstrap libraries. May be you will find another use for this plugin but it is very simple and it is not designed to compete fully-featured Java SE project type.

The only you can specify in this plugin is you main class for execution (if any).

MPowerPlayer Plugin

This plugin is pretty much a production quality and will allow the Mobility Pack to recognize MPowerPlayer as a standard Java ME emulator using the regular Add Platform wizard. The operation is completely transparent. Simply build and install in the IDE and then add it using the Java Platform Manager. This should certainly please the Apple users as this is their only option when they decide to develop Java ME applications on their Mac.

SVG support

SVG support from release 5.5 was merged to trunk. This also means the version of the document is now equal to 5.5, so it is possible to edit the visual designs in both versions of the IDE.

Mobility Code Snippets

Milestone 4 provides infrastructure for creating code snippets that can be easily inserted into the source code with minimum effort. Some sample code snippets are included in this release but users can add their own using the same approach as described http://platform.netbeans.org/tutorials/nbm-palette-api1.html. The module to modify when adding your own snippets is Mobility Code Snippets inside the Mobility suite.

When adding the snippets make sure you add them to class context otherwise the code will not be compilable. As of this release no analysis is done on the code prior to inserting to avoid this problem.

Attachments

BlackBerry-debugger.png		91039 bytes
BlackBerry-deployment.png		15577 bytes
BlackBerry-platform.png		14314 bytes
Deployment-customizer.png		11460 bytes
DeploymentManager.png		9098 bytes
JavaSE-plugin.png		10322 bytes
MVD_SVG_screenshot..png		87925 bytes