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 > <wa...@connect-mobile.co.za> 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
