Re: Multiple source roots?

I might have missed something, but I found migrating to IntelliJ quite 
hard because it doesn't seem to handle profiles like NetBeans does. I 
know it can be made to work in IJ, since some devs in our company put 
effort into doing that. From what I know, they had to re-do most of the 
builds and deployments specifically for IJ. This gets weird if your team 
uses both NetBeans and IntelliJ (it did get weird for us).

What I actually like about NetBeans is that most of the project 
configuration is taken directly from the pom, which is more universal 
(pom is a standard). Some of others discussing here also mentioned this 
saying that NB is a GUI for the build system. To be fair I think it is a 
bit more, but I like that it's not much more then that. Using Maven as 
much as possible makes the project work both in CI tools and in NB (and 
even in IJ partially).

I don't know if something has changed since 2023, but I wasn't able to 
open related projects together in IntelliJ. It seems IJ doesn't have the 
concept of a workspace (like project groups in NetBeans). In IJ, every 
project was just opened in a new window, which I personally find strange 
for an IDE. I guess IJ expects you to define some kind of multi-root 
setup, whereas in NB you just open the projects you need. Maybe that's 
the part you missed?
E.g. this is a screen from 3 projects opened in one group, 2 small 
projects and one large project with modules. I could even open a PHP 
project with completely different set of build tools. I can define all 
that as a project group (workspace). Perhaps that will work for you.


As for build profiles, I think you might have missed how they work in 
NB. Coming from IJ, you might expect build profiles not to do much. From 
what I know, in IJ profiles are buried deep in a separate Maven tab.
In NB, they actually reduce a lengthy list of profiles to just the one 
required within the selected profile. This makes it easy to focus on a 
specific part of a large system. It works for me anyway. So it's not 
like in NB, where you choose a profile you actually work on (which 
impacts both the build process and the list of modules I mentioned).


Sure, Maven builds are hard to understand at first. But most of that can 
be generated when you create a project. It gets more complicated as the 
project evolves, but thankfully these days you can paste your pom into a 
GPT/LLM and it will describe it for you. And most of the daily in pom 
changes are just version properties updates, so average dev don't need 
to understand that.

Regards,
Maciej Nux

Blake McBride (2025-09-19 16:00):
> IntelliJ does indeed understand project structure. In fact, multiple 
> source roots in IntelliJ are trivial.
>
> Blake
>
> On Fri, Sep 19, 2025 at 4:14 AM Maciej Jaros 
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>     I used InteliJ and I didn't like that it doesn't really understand
>     project structure and especially profiles. NB works with maven to
>     figure out dependencies and you can use profiles to share build
>     groups with other devs.
>
>     For example here you have a full build and a utils build that can
>     be built separately (not always great, but it works good enough in
>     NB):
>
>     <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
>     <project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
>     <http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0>
>              xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
>     <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance>
>              xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
>     https://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd"
>     <http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0https://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd>>
>
>         <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
>         <groupId>pl.myproject</groupId>
>         <artifactId>myproject</artifactId>
>         <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
>         <packaging>pom</packaging>
>         <name>myproject</name>
>
>         <modules>
>             <module>myproject-core</module>
>             <module>myproject-saas</module>
>             <module>myproject-utils</module>
>             <module>myproject-dwh</module>
>             <module>myproject-lms-client</module>
>             <module>myproject-extapp</module>
>             <module>myproject-opac</module>
>         </modules>
>
>         <profiles>
>             <!-- default -->
>             <profile>
>                 <id>full</id>
>                 <activation>
>     <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
>                 </activation>
>                 <modules>
>     <module>myproject-core</module>
>     <module>myproject-saas</module>
>     <module>myproject-lms-client</module>
>     <module>myproject-extapp</module>
>     <module>myproject-aash</module>
>     <module>myproject-utils</module>
>                     <module>myproject-dwh</module>
>     <module>myproject-opac</module>
>                 </modules>
>             </profile>
>
>             <!-- UTILS -->
>             <profile>
>                 <id>utils-build-only</id>
>                 <properties>
>     <skip.integration.tests>true</skip.integration.tests>
>     <skip.unit.tests>true</skip.unit.tests>
>                 </properties>
>                 <modules>
>     <module>myproject-saas</module>
>     <module>myproject-utils</module>
>                 </modules>
>             </profile>
>             <profile>
>                 <id>utils-development</id>
>                 <properties>
>     <skip.integration.tests>true</skip.integration.tests>
>                 </properties>
>                 <modules>
>     <module>myproject-saas</module>
>     <module>myproject-utils</module>
>                 </modules>
>             </profile>
>             <profile>
>                 <id>utils-full</id>
>                 <modules>
>     <module>myproject-saas</module>
>     <module>myproject-utils</module>
>                 </modules>
>             </profile>
>         </profiles>
>
>         <build>
>             <plugins>
>                 <plugin>
>     <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
>     <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
>                     <version>3.14.0</version>
>                     <configuration>
>                         <release>17</release>
>                         <encoding>UTF-8</encoding>
>                     </configuration>
>                 </plugin>
>             </plugins>
>         </build>
>
>         <dependencies>
>             <dependency>
>     <groupId>org.apache.logging.log4j</groupId>
>     <artifactId>log4j-core</artifactId>
>                 <version>2.24.3</version>
>             </dependency>
>             <dependency>
>     <groupId>org.junit.jupiter</groupId>
>     <artifactId>junit-jupiter-engine</artifactId>
>                 <scope>test</scope>
>             </dependency>
>         </dependencies>
>
>     </project>
>
>
>
>     Blake McBride (2025-09-18 22:42):
>>     According to ChatGPT:
>>
>>     If you have *multiple source roots*, Maven itself only supports a
>>     *single* |<sourceDirectory>| and |<testSourceDirectory>| in the
>>     |<build>| section. To handle *more than one*, you need to
>>     *declare one as the “main”* and then use the
>>     |build-helper-maven-plugin| to add the rest.
>>
>>     This is one of many reasons I resorted to my own build system.
>>
>>     (BTW, IntelliJ supports any number of source roots.)
>>
>>     --blake
>