It's great to see that many public Maven2 remote repositories are providing the index of the repository now. I've just figured Terracotta.org has used the the Nexus command line tool to create such index. Of course I have my own selfish reasons to be happy about it.

The 3.1 (coming soon) version of Maven integration for NetBeans is using these indexes to greatly enhance the user experience within the IDE. Let's preview some of the places that benefit from the indexing data.

First we need to add the Terracotta.org repository to the list of known repositories.

That's done in the Maven Repositories top level window. You can open it from Windows menu.

To verify we added the correct thing, let's expand the root node of the new repository and see what content we have there.

You can easily drill down from groupIds to artifactIds to versions. There you can immediately add the artifact to your projects or (if the metadata is present) view project website, file a bug or checkout the sources.

Browsing is cool but it gets boring after a while. The true integration puts the metadata from the index right at your fingertips when you need it.

For example when creating a new project from archetype

or in the editor for your poject's POM file when you need to check what dependencies or maven plugins are available and in what versions.

The new 3.1 version of Mevenide is not 100% ready for release, however if you want to test drive the beta quality code, it's fairly easy to setup. Download the latest NBM binaries from the NetBeans.org continuous integration machine and install them through the Tools/Plugins dialog. And while you are in testing mode, you should check it in the NetBeans 6.1 Beta build

Enjoy

Milos