Using Netbeans

[BLUEBELL]

Hello everyone greetings from team 3773. Is there a way to use Netbeans instead of Eclipse for programming FRC robot in Java? My team has a very old computer and must use a platform independent development environment, and Eclipse does not work as well as Netbeans does in this respect. If anyone has any information about using Netbeans instead of Eclipse for the 2015 FRC Java programming please let me know.

[AlexBrinister]

Why does Eclipse not work as well? It is also platform independent.

You would need to do all of the configuration manually. For example, you would need to reference the wpilib and networktables jars in your project manually. You would need to write commands/commandgroups manually instead of using a context menu to make a new one. That's not a huge deal. The debugger and deploy function would need to be set up manually. In other words, yes, you can do it but its a pain.

Alex Brinister

[Ozuru]

"must use a platform independent development environment"

Do you understand what platform independent means? Eclipse lags the PC as much as Netbeans does - we also use an old computer but Eclipse works just fine. The amount of work required to use Netbeans is not worth the reward in my opinion.

[mspoehr]

I am currently working on this. I don't like Eclipse, only because I don't think it is as polished as NetBeans is. In theory, as long as you have the libraries and the necessary build scripts, you should be able to use any IDE. I am working on simply using Ant to build and deploy. I have it working to the point that it compiles and deploys code the roboRIO, but for some reason the rio doesn't like something about the code. I'll get back to you if I figure it out.

[fsilberberg]

Originally Posted by mspoehr

I am currently working on this. I don't like Eclipse, only because I don't think it is as polished as NetBeans is. In theory, as long as you have the libraries and the necessary build scripts, you should be able to use any IDE. I am working on simply using Ant to build and deploy. I have it working to the point that it compiles and deploys code the roboRIO, but for some reason the rio doesn't like something about the code. I'll get back to you if I figure it out.

You should just be able to use the existing ant scripts in ~/wpilib/java/current/ant/. The relevant files are the build.xml, build.properties, and the robotCommand/robotDebugCommand scripts.