"I want an IDE that manage his projects by using Ant !"

(Jesse, please don't kill me for cross-posting, this is your work after
all :-)

The impatient among us, just click on this link and skip the rest

    http://projects.netbeans.org/buildsys/projects_quickstart.html


Others, please read on:

A few months back Vincent Brabant wrote this weblog

    "I want an IDE that manage his projects by using Ant !"
    <http://weblogs.java.net/pub/wlg/685>

which generated quite some discussions around the world, like this

    "Why can't IDEs use Ant as their project files?"
    <http://jroller.net/comments/jduska/weblog/p_a_href_http_weblogs>

and this

    "If IDE Why use ANT?"
    http://saloon.javaranch.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=67&t=000194

To Vincent and like-minded java developers, you don't have to ask
yourself this tough "IDE or Ant" question any longer.  In NetBeans 4.0
there will be a completely new project system which is entirely based on
Apache Ant.  To our best knowledge this new NetBeans project system
provides the tightest integration with Ant of any major IDE. All the
changes you make to your project's configuration are registered in the
project's Ant build script. You never have to run a special "Export to
Ant Script" action, the Ant script is always in sync with your project.

The IDE will use Ant internally to build your apps, and actually also do
a few more things.  The important consequence is that you can run Ant
outside of the IDE to produce exactly the same bits as what you'd get
inside the IDE.  (Think about nightly builds, think about your friends
who prefer emacs/vi, think about the fear of being stuck with one IDE
for the rest of your life,...)

For normal cases, by which I mean probably 90% of real world situations,
the users won't have to know Ant syntax to use the IDE.  But the full
power of Apache Ant is available to the power users.

The build is still rough.  It's intended for NB 4.0 (late summer) and we
are yet to release 3.6 after all!  But all of us in the team at Sun
responsible for this part of the NetBeans code base already use it for
our daily works and we think it's pretty cool :-)

We need some help.  Everybody, please take a look at this quick guide

    http://projects.netbeans.org/buildsys/projects_quickstart.html

download the latest dev build, play with it, and tell us what you think.
We especially want to hear the negative comments.  It's early in 4.0
release cycle and we want to fix things which we overlooked.  You can
send us positive feedback too :-)

Thanks a lot

    -- Trung

[I noticed that the dev build installer still says 3.6 and offers the
user to install the IDE into NetBeans3.6!  It's a bug, please choose
a different dir, otherwise the bits are okay.]