More community involvement with NetDEV
NetBeans is an open source project, but sometimes it’s hard to find your ways around the processes required to get some changes into the code base. That’s why there is a new project for making it easier for community members not only to fix issues, but also to propose and implement enhancements: NetDEV. One area that is of particular interest to many contributors are the tools for the creation of plugins for NetBeans itself. These tools are mainly organizes in the API support project.
The NetBeans Team only has limited resources, so with every release they define some areas that will be improved a lot, and others that are in maintenance mode until the next release, so only serious bugs ( <=P2 or in NetBeans notation: <P2 
) will be fixed. APIsupport is in maintenance mode until 6.8. With NetDEV we’ve got a chance to improve these tools ourselves and make it easier for ourselves and for others to create plugins for NetBeans and applications based on the platform.
From the website:
“While NetFIX process is lighter and more bug fix oriented, goal of the NetDEV process is to cooperate with NetBeans community on development of new features. Not only that, active and quality contributions can bring community developers a push access to NetBeans source code repository or even ownership of some modules. Only a handful of functionality areas will be open to feature contributions in the beginning but we plan to extend the list once the process gets run in.”
There’s also a cookbook page for getting started:
http://wiki.netbeans.org/NetDEVCookBook
And here you can find a list of projects that are being planned.
http://wiki.netbeans.org/NetDEVIssues (it’s still a short list, but it’s up to you to change this 
)
As you might have noticed I’ve been talking about some enhancements to the NetBeans UI recently. My plan is to contribute this code to NetBeans to make it easier to use third-party look & feels to either IDE or platform apps. It’s work in progress, but you can follow the progress here:
http://wiki.netbeans.org/OtherTabFOW
In case you would like to participate, I’m still looking for testers. Join NetDEV and help enhancing NetBeans!
Hi Toni,
I have minimal knowledge about the issue you’re trying to resolve, but I have a suggestion, if you like. I think instead of hard-coding the LAF string passing to UIManager, you could map it to some property that could be read from some relevant properties file in the NB Platform Application project.
I hope this is making some sense.
Best Wishes,
Varun
Comment by Varun
— 23. July 2009 @ 18:07
Hi Varun, passing of the String to the UIManager isn’t part of my project. It’s just one way how users can set the look & feel.
–Toni
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