Java Reference
In-Depth Information
Additionally, if one of our methods overrides a method from a parent class, the icon
shown below will be placed in the left margin next to the method declaration.
The icon is an upper case
O
inside a circle, the O, of course, stands for "override".
Similarly, when one of our methods is an implementation of one of the interfaces that
our class implements, the icon shown below will be placed in the left margin of the
method declaration.
The icon is an uppercase
I
inside a green circle, which stands for "implements".
NetBeans also provides visual cues in the form of fonts and font colors, for example,
static methods and variables are shown in
italics
, member variables are shown in
green, and Java reserved keywords are shown in blue. All of the above cues can be
seen in the screenshot at the beginning of this section.
Another nice feature of the NetBeans editor is that highlighting a method or variable
highlights it everywhere it is used in the currently open file.
Summary
In this chapter, we provided an introduction to NetBeans as an IDE, explaining
the different ways that NetBeans can be obtained, we also covered how to install
NetBeans for the different platforms it supports.
Additionally, we looked at how to set up NetBeans with third party Java EE
application servers and with third party Relational Database Systems, including how
to register a JDBC driver for the RDBMS in question.
We also built and deployed our first Java EE application, and took a first look at the
NetBeans HTTP monitor, which helps us better understand how our code behaves
"under the hood" by providing request headers, request attributes, session attributes,
at a glance.
Finally, we covered some of the NetBeans features such as code completion, code
templates, keyboard shortcuts and visual cues that allow us to do our job as software
developers more effectively.
