App Engine Java Development with Netbeans

If you just started with App engine development, you might be having a feeling that Eclipse is the preferred IDE. And, Google also has offered its official plug-in to Eclipse IDE alone.

But what about the people who are not using Eclipse? Of course, you can always do a command line development but who does that these days!?

For Netbeans users, the plug-in nbappengine brings the Java app engine development to the Netbeans platform. Here’s how you can start developing your app engine apps on Netbeans.

Installing nbappengine plugin on Netbeans

1. First thing first: Install the latest Netbeans (6.9 at the time of typing these characters) and open the IDE.
2. Go to Tools -> Plugins -> Settings and click “Add” button to add the nbappengine update center URL.
3. Now give a name and the URL of the update center according to your version of Netbeans.
   • Netbeans 6.9: http://kenai.com/downloads/nbappengine/NetBeans69/updates.xml
   • Netbeans 6.8: http://kenai.com/projects/nbappengine/downloads/download/Latest_NetBeans68/updates.xml
   • Netbeans 6.7: http://kenai.com/projects/nbappengine/downloads/download/1.0_NetBeans671/updates.xml
4. After adding it, now come back to the “Available Plugins” tab and do a search for “Google”. Select all the plug-ins that are related to the App Engine and click install button.

Configuring App Engine SDK with Netbeans
Now you’ve installed the nbappengine plugin on your Netbeans IDE.  The coming steps will tell you how you can configure the plugin with the App Engine SDK.

1. Download the App Engine SDK for Java and extract the zip contents to your favorite location.
2. In the Netbeans IDE, go to Services window (Ctrl + 5 is the shortcut key) and right click on the Servers menu and select “Add Server“.
3. Now select the “Google App Engine” from the list of servers and in the next screen choose the folder where you extracted your SDK files.
4. Configure the server properties if you wish to change it and then click “Finish”.

Creating and deploying your first App Engine app on Netbeans
Now its the time to create a brand-new app engine application.

1. In Netbeans, select “File -> New Project -> Java Web -> Web application” and follow the wizard to create the project.
2. In the “Server and Settings” page choose “Google App Engine” as your server so that you’ll get the app-engine related files (such as appengine-web.xml) pre-created for you.
3. When you run/debug this application, Netbeans will start the app engine server (Jetty) and will deploy your application there.
4. To deploy the application to the App Engine server, just right click on the project and choose “Deploy to Google App Engine”. it’ll prompt you for the Google account credentials. After you provided that info, your app will be uploaded to the cloud.

Reference : App Engine Java development on Netbeans from our JCG partner Veera Sundar.

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