Original informations taken from the grant form

Detailed project description

The purpose of this new project is to provide a substitute to the default library management in Netbeans IDE in adding a full Ivy integration.

For now, there is only two ways to have a good dependency management. The first is to use Maven2, its integration is the goal of the Mevenide project. The second way, is to use Ivy. Indeed, Ivy is a very efficient dependency management tool tightly integrated with Ant. Feature comparisons can be found on the net :

• http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Feature+Comparisons
• http://ant.apache.org/ivy/m2comparison.html)

Furthermore, default Netbeans projects are Ant based projects, and all build scripts are Ant build scripts.

This is the reason why we think that it will be very powerful and elegant to add support of Ivy in a transparent manner in this IDE. This includes:

• support of Ivy and its powerful transitive dependency management support to download the dependencies and setup project classpath based on dependency resolution result,
• provide actions to ease adding/removing dependencies to a Netbeans project,
• ivy.xml files edition support, providing both structural completion (based on ivy.xsd, with inline documentation as provided in the reference documentation) and semantic completion, using Ivy API to query the repositories to allow code completion on dependency versions, configuration mapping, ...
• settings.xml files edition support, with structural code completion, including support for user defined Ivy plugins.

Benefits to the Netbeans Community

The most obvious benefit is to provide access to all existing repositories in the open source community with a minimum of changes in Netbeans projects structure. Indeed, Ivy is compatible with Maven repositories and very flexible so that any file accessible by the end user can be turned in a repository.

Of course, you can already keep all your ant based netbeans project and adding Ivy support : http://wiki.netbeans.org/FaqIvy By the way, having completion during typing code is better. Thus the IDE should provide an easy way to have dependency management.

Furthermore support for advanced integration with Apache Ivy, such as powerful code completion of Ivy metadata and settings files, would make Netbeans the best IDE to work with Ant + Ivy.

Related projects

• IvyDE : Ivy is already integrated in Eclipse
• Mevenide2 : This is the maven 2 integration in Netbeans with interesting features

Usefull links

• http://wiki.netbeans.org/IvyIntegrationNotes from David Konecmy.
• http://wiki.netbeans.org/FaqIvy
• Netbeans 6.1 javadoc