February 2006 Archives

Last week I discovered the netbeans graph library. It seems quite flexible so far. For mevenide2 I managed to create a nice transitive dependencies graph.

Things I had to do:

I have changed the node renderer to visually distinguish different scopes (compile/test/runtime/..).

I've overriden the link renderer to draw thick lines from the project's artifact. That way it should be more obvious what are the direct dependencies.

When a node is selected by user, it's dependencies are also selected. Again a nice visual indication of interdependencies, plus helps when moving nodes around.

I've implemented my own graph node layouter, because the default didn't scale for big numbers of dependencies and was a bit chaotic for projects with interdependent dependencies. The current one attempts to cluster the related dependencies together. As can be seen in the picture, the netbeans deps are separated from the maven dependencies visually.

Implementing layout persistece is supported by the graph library, so when you relayout the graph, it's not lost the next time you open it..

All and together, quite good results for the few hours I spent on the feature. The hardest part was coming up with the layouting algorithm.

Even though I'm not a J2ME developer, I've always liked the screenshots of Netbeans Mobile Edition. They have these cool looking diagrams everywhere. Yesterday I've figured their library for diagram creation is free to use for everyone. After a day of hacking I have some cool looking diagram in the Maven2 support as well. For starters I've implemented diagram for displaying the module structure of a Maven2 multiproject. Works quite well, but obviously I'm not good at creating graphics :) Now I have to start thinking about other places in Mevenide that could make use of some diagrams. Any ideas?

For those creating netbeans modules using Maven (most probably with the maven-nbm-plugin) the biggest problem always was to populate the local repository with Netbeans API modules. Not anymore, thanks to Charlie Hunt (Nb Evangelist) who provided the webspace, I managed to setup a remote repository for these artifacts. Here it is:
http://208.44.201.216:18080/maven/. Not only does it host the artifacts, but also declares dependencies in the poms (you get transitivity in dependencies) and for some APIs it even contains javadoc artifacts.

With the IDE integration, you get the docs at your fingertips then.

Adding it to your pom is simple.