Re: Teaching with NetBeans

At 11:57 AM 6/17/03 +0200, you wrote:
>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 ...
>>consider starting with net beans instead. ignore the project tab. ...
>
>One option is to turn off the Projects module - that will get rid of the
>projects tab entirely.

good idea, i did not know that you could do that.


>Of course, you probably don't want your students to have to
>configure NetBeans, just use it.

right!

>  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)

this is good to know. in my case, i am stuck with whatever they have done 
in the labs. unless the config files are in a place where i can change 
them. the oroginal poster may find this useful.

>- Do a custom build with only the modules you want and
>have your students download that from some shared location

downloading would be ok, but in my case on windoze, the students can not 
write to the c drive. but installing a custom build sounds like a good idea.


>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. ...
>Does any of this sound interesting?

yes and no. i knew that netbeans is infinitely configurable and has a 
bazillion plug-in's, but mostly i just use i and discover features as i ned 
them. mostly i just avoid the project tab, but since i have ant and tests 
in there in case netbeans is not available, my filesystem getting pretty 
ugly (:

on the yes side, sounds great!

on the no side, as you pointed out. someone will have to make and maintain it

you have probably given me (and others) enough clues in *one* post to get 
around many problems. i did find some good stuff in the ant book on 
netbeans, when i looked there for an answer to the original post. i suspect 
that a *small* document or addition to the manual that was more about 
installation and configuration options would be work better.

thanks

---
ray tayek http://tayek.com/ actively seeking mentoring or telecommuting work
vice chair orange county java users group http://www.ocjug.org/
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