Honestly, I think NB should have an internal conversation about removing
the "new project" support for Ant projects, while still being able to
open existing ones. It just confuses a lot of people if they're not
going to be supported.
I agree, if and ONLY if you provide at least a rudimentary way to
convert ANT projects to Maven projects. I have been struggling with
this issue too long. I have hundreds of Ant based projects that I would
love to turn over immediately to Maven... but I can't , am struggling,
and haven't coded a darn line in two months... I used to code 10 hours
a day ... and now... embarrassed by my inability to convert.,.
I exaggerate a bit, I still code in "Old" Netbeans 8.2, but I know the
days are numbered...
On 2021-04-20 08:23, Will Hartung wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 12:55 AM Wayne Gemmell | Connect
> wrote:
>
>> Is the perception that nobody does Maven EAR's anymore or that nobody uses
>> EARs? I have a web app that has given me no shortage of issuse with ant.
>> I'm trying to move it to Maven. If nobody is using maven then I need to move
>> to something else. If nobody is using EAR's anymore then I'm pretty stuck
>> figuring out this Maven issue.
>
> Well, it's several things.
>
> EARs are less popular because their necessity has been greatly reduced.
> Session beans can be placed in WARs now, so for many use cases, a WAR is
> completely adequate to the task.
>
> However, it's not suitable for all use cases.
>
> Notably, MDBs can not be deployed in WARs. But only as an EJB either deployed
> standalone, or bundled within an EAR.
>
> With the hue and cry over micro services and "down with the monolith", just
> the idea of a large application bundled in a EAR is falling out of favor.
>
> Also, there's a history of advocacy underlying this. Sun used NetBeans as a
> mechanism to advocate for Java and Java EE. It behooved them to have
> something like NetBeans to make Java EE development easier. So, it was
> important for NetBeans to have really first class Java EE support. Bundling
> the Java EE wizards and templates along with Glassfish all helped promote
> that.
>
> Of course, now, with the great Java Diaspora out of Oracle, the goals and
> drivers are different.
>
> For your project, if all you have is a web app and some session beans, then a
> simple WAR file is good to go. The Ant projects seem to essentially be
> deprecated now, so I would not rely on those for anything. If practical,
> especially if your project is young, I would migrate it to Maven. The Maven
> WAR is a pretty simple project and seems to work ok. Maven isn't going away
> any time soon, Gradle, it's primary competitor, doesn't really have the
> traction to overcome it yet, and it's been going for some time. If nothing
> else, the pom.xml file has become a de facto portable project format if, for
> nothing else, to capture dependencies.
>
> Honestly, I think NB should have an internal conversation about removing the
> "new project" support for Ant projects, while still being able to open
> existing ones. It just confuses a lot of people if they're not going to be
> supported.
>
> And I still haven't heard any concrete position the project has on
> internalizing Maven archetypes used for project wizards, or the process of
> adopting that.
>
> Legacy archetypes that used to work in NB 8 are now failing because they've
> vanished from Maven central. So, an external dependency broke an internal
> feature.
>
> Feel free to follow up with specific questions about getting your project to
> work and/or converted to Maven.
>
> Regards,
>
> Will Hartung
