Spring Framework 2.5 support for Java SE applications in NetBeans IDE 6.1 Beta -

We have seen in an earlier post Spring support in Netbeans IDE 6.1 Beta that Spring support for Java SE applications is not much interesting in NetBeans IDE 6.1 Beta. The Spring support is actually considered a part of the web component and hence the wizard appears only when we start a web application in NetBeans IDE 6.1 Beta.

I even found two bugs with the working of Spring Configuration dialog box. We saw how I have reported the bug to NetBeans IssueZilla server in an earlier post Logging issue found in Netbeans IDE 6.1 Beta.

When I checked the issue zilla page again today I found that the issue is fixed. This was very quick. I am glad to have reported the bug as it got fixed right away. The fixed part of the Spring support will not be visible in the NetBeans IDE 6.1 beta but it will be available in the latest development release of NetBeans IDE unless there is another release candidate announced from NetBeans team.


You can see the status of the bug set to FIXED. Now I got impatient to test the new version of NetBeans IDE. I have NetBeans IDE 6.1 Beta already installed on my PC. I do not want to override the IDE 6.1 Beta yet as I want to experiment more on it.

I decided to check the new development version of NetBeans on a freshly build VirtualBox XP machine. I use a VirtualBox virtual XP machine for this type of testing of softwares. I have created a template hard disk and installed Windows XP, Java SE 6.0 on it. I make a clone of the hard disk any time I need a fresh machine with the VBoxManage clonevdi command and use this new virtual hard disk to make a fresh machine for testing.

I downloaded the latest development version of NetBeans from the development downloads page. This version is also called as nightly build version, as this is kept ready each night ready to be tested on the site. This version contains all the updates done till now to the current head branch of the source code.


When I started installing the nightly build version of NetBeans on my fresh VirtualBox XP machine I can see the splash screen of the IDE mentioning DEVELOPMENT VERSION on the graphics.


I created a project as Java SE project. Added one bean Developer to the project so that I can now use that bean class as my configured bean in spring configuration file. I then checked the New file wizard. The choose file type page presented Spring XML configuration file option in the File Types in the Others categories. This is a big change which is not there in the NetBeans IDE 6.1 Beta. This confirms that the issue I have logged is really fixed and there are updates to the working and workflows of the IDE since then.


It offered me a page to fill in the name for my configuration file.


It also offered me selection for Spring Schema files. This was done with considerable efforts in my last post on Spring configuration files. Remember that I did not mentioned of adding Spring Framework 2.5 library support in the project. Actually I forgot to add the library and the page for spring namespaces has a button as Add Spring Framework.

This is great . As soon as I clicked the button spring JARS were added to my project and the button was removed from the wizard.

I tested all the code completion features of the spring configuration file and they were working as before.

This demonstrates that the next version of NetBeans will have the new updated Spring Framework support and yes my bug request was looked after and fixed very quickly.

I will continue testing the NetBeans IDE 6.1 Beta version for new topics. VirtualBox XP machine will provide me test bed to test things like this time and again.

Tushar Joshi, Nagpur