Java™ Application Development on Linux - Dator

10.2 NetBeans: The Open Source IDE24110.2.3 Getting Around in NetBeansLet’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’lldo with NetBeans won’t require much use of the menus—there are so manyshortcuts 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 (seeSection 10.2.5).The three tabs below the icons, labeled Editing, GUI Editing, andDebugging, modify the window to provide three distinct workspaces. Eachone customizes the window environment for a specific task, but it is stillworking on the same files.Next, on the left, comes the Explorer, which is in many ways similar tothe tools that you may use for traversing filesystems on a Windows or Linuxsystem.One oddity of NetBeans is that it doesn’t just use the files as it finds themin the directories on your hard drive(s). Rather, is requires you to designate apiece of the filesystem as the part that you want to use. You can designate severalsuch 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 knowabout 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.• Local files need no special treatment; they are just the local files on yourhard drive.• If a filesystem is mounted under a version control system (CVS or genericVCS), then its files can have version control operations performed on them(checkin, checkout, and so on), via commands in the IDE. (More on thatbelow.) Also, special directories used by the version control system (e.g.,CVS) are hidden from the display, as you almost never want to manipulatethese files directly.• When you mount a JAR file or ZIP archive as a filesystem, NetBeansdisplays the contents of the archive as if they were just files in adirectory—which can make them easier to manipulate. More importantly,the JAR is automatically added to the classpath for Java compiling.