Netbeans 6.1 Support For Ant File Editing - One Thing What I Miss 📎
The support for working with Ant-Files in Netbeans 6.1 is really good. However Eclipse provides a better editing experience right now. Especially useful in eclipse is the resolution of variables in the build.xml. If you hover over a variable in build.xml e.g. ${some.variable} which was defined in my.properties:
some.variable=hello world
Eclipse will show you the resolved values in a tool tip - however Netbeans 6.1 is not able to do that right now (or I didn't found the fuctionality :-)). Even more useful is the resolution of more complex ids:
<path id="appserver.client.classpath">
<fileset dir="${appserver.client.lib}">
<include name="*.jar"/>
</fileset>
</path>
In the upper case Eclipse would resolve the <path refid="appserver.client.classpath"/> in the editor (so you will see all JARs listed) - which is really useful.
It shouldn't be that hard to support this feature in Netbeans as well - then the Ant-support would be outstanding. Now Netbeans is able to map Ant-Task to IDE actions, so you are able to work with existing Ant-projects seemlessly. Beyond that, you can even create shortcuts (just go to a task, right mouse click and choose "create shortcut") and execute the Ant-Tasks from menues or toolbars. It takes about 2 seconds to do that ...and can save you a considerable amount of time afterwards.