Blogging Roller

Eclipse doesn't work very well on Solaris x86, mostly due to the fact it is linked to Motif rather than GNOME. Everything appears to be double spaced and drag and drop don't work at all. I guess I could get the source and rebuild Eclipse against GNOME, but I would rather use my time to get up and running in Netbeans.

Netbeans 4.0b2 looks really good and works well on Solaris x86 (as you might expect). Unfortunately, I ran into a couple of problems while setting up for Roller development in Netbeans. I'm still surfing the mailing list archives and the bug tracker to determine if my problems are caused by known bugs, unknown bugs, or just user error on my part.

• Problem fetching a CVS "sub-module": Roller lives in the Java.Net CVS in /cvr/roller/roller, but I would like to checkout Roller code into ~/src/roller not ~/src/roller/roller. I tried to do this with the Netbeans by turning on the advanced settings and using various combinations of the "Checkout into Folder" and "Do Not Shorten Module Paths" but to no avail. I ended up using command-line CVS to do the trick, some thing like this cvs -d <cvsroot> co -d ~src/roller roller/roller. From there on out I was able to use the Netbeans CVS client on my code to update, commit, diff, etc.
  
  
• Problems importing the Roller build.xml file: Netbeans 4.0b2 has excellent Ant integration, but I had problems making it work with Roller. I tried setting up Roller as a "Web project with an existing Ant script" but when I pointed Netbeans at the Roller Ant file I got "Selected file is not a valid Ant script."

Update:

Turns out, I was able to fix the Roller build script by changing the way in which it brings in it's properties XML file. I changed the third line of the build script from this:

<!ENTITY properties SYSTEM "file:./properties.xmlf">

to this:

<!ENTITY properties SYSTEM "properties.xmlf">

Once I did that, I was able to bring Roller in as a "Java application with an exiting Ant script." I'm subscribed to the Netbeans users mailing list now and I'll direct my future gripes there. And, I'll write up a Roller Development with Netbeans document for the Roller Wiki once I get things sorted out.