Java Reference
In-Depth Information
10.2.3
Let's take a look, from top down, at NetBeans' main window. First, of course,
is the menu bar. There are lots of choices to explore there. Much of what you'll
do with NetBeans won't require much use of the menus—there are so many
shortcuts elsewhere.
Next comes a row of icons, which are just shortcuts for menu times.
This row of icons can be customized, and you can even add your own (see
Section 10.2.5).
The three tabs below the icons, labeled
Editing
,
GUI Editing
, and
Debugging
, modify the window to provide three distinct workspaces. Each
one customizes the window environment for a specific task, but it is still
working on the same files.
Next, on the left, comes the
Explorer
, which is in many ways similar to
the tools that you may use for traversing filesystems on a Windows or Linux
system.
One oddity of NetBeans is that it doesn't just use the files as it finds them
in the directories on your hard drive(s). Rather, is requires you to designate a
piece of the filesystem as the part that you want to use. You can designate sev-
eral such pieces. Each piece is “mounted” as if it were a mountable filesystem.
(This is an operating system concept. If you're not familiar with it, don't worry.
For the purposes of NetBeans, just think of the IDE as too dumb to know
about any files until you tell it about them.)
There are three different types of files that you can mount—local, CVS,
or JAR. By specifying the type, NetBeans can treat each one in its special way.
Getting Around in NetBeans
• Local files need no special treatment; they are just the local files on your
hard drive.
• If a filesystem is mounted under a version control system (CVS or generic
VCS), then its files can have version control operations performed on them
(checkin, checkout, and so on), via commands in the IDE. (More on that
below.) Also, special directories used by the version control system (e.g.,
CVS) are hidden from the display, as you almost never want to manipulate
these files directly.
• When you mount a JAR file or ZIP archive as a filesystem, NetBeans
displays the
contents
of the archive as if they were just files in a
directory—which can make them easier to manipulate. More importantly,
the JAR is automatically added to the classpath for Java compiling.
