Re: Teaching with NetBeans

Ray Tayek wrote:

> At 11:41 AM 6/12/03 -0400, you wrote:
>
>> ...
>> NetBeans gives me the opportunity to maybe offer the students 
>> something they can move too when they have "graduated" out of BlueJ. 
>> We still have a lot of work to do to integrate BlueJ into the course 
>> but a few students have said they really like it and many have stuck 
>> with it.
>
>
> consider starting with net beans instead. ignore the project tab. put 
> the code in a package using the default project. and just hit f9 and 
> f6. for tje second project, use the project manager to create it. but 
> again ignore the project tab (i.e. just use the filesystem tab). and 
> hit f6 and f9 a lot. 

One option is to turn off the Projects module - that will get rid of the
projects tab entirely.

Of course, you probably don't want your students to have to
configure NetBeans, just use it.  There are two options:

 - Preconfigure a shared version on a drive that's shared with
all the student workstations.  After installation, delete
projects.jar from the modules directory (you may want
to turn off other modules to simplify the experience for
your students)
 - Do a custom build with only the modules you want and
have your students download that from some shared location

I've long thought we should do a NetBeans "education build"
preconfigured with fewer bells and whistles.  You can get
close to tha by doing a build with ant -Dmoduleconfig=slim,
but you still have, for example, projects.  If we could agree
on what needs to be in it, I'd be willing to make the build
for you (off the 3.5 release trunk or whatever) and send
it your way.  Longer term,
I think this should be downloadable on the web site;  that
requires a bunch of work from the folks maintaining the
web site and build process to get automated "edu build"
versions posted.  In the short term, it's fairly simple to
add build targets to the build script.

Does any of this sound interesting?

-Tim