Tim Boudreau

Over the last week I wrote a NetBeans plugin for node.js - sources are in NetBeans' contrib repository.

What it gives you:

• A Node project type

• Clickable stack traces in the output window

• A run with node action on Javascript files (and of course, the project)

• Integration with Node Package Manager (npm) and a slick little UI for adding libraries

• GUI for editing package.json files, and generating their standard contents

• Ability to store machine-specific command-line arguments (excluded from version control if you use NetBeans' version control).

• Ability to download Node's sources so the highlighted stack traces point somewhere

A Node Project in NetBeans

The project metadata is simply the standard package.json metadata which is part of any Node module, so there are (almost) no additional NetBeans-specific files added to a project - and any library you get with npm will also be openable as a project.

The libraries customizer

The one exception to the no-funky-metadata-files rule is that you can provide command-line arguments to the project. Since these are most-likely machine-specific, they are stored in an .nbrun file which NetBeans knows not to put under version-control.

Library Info - really just JSON-meets-Swing

Basically, I wanted to learn Node.js, and having some decent tools to work with it reduces the headaches - NetBeans already has excellent Javascript editor support thanks to Tor Norbye's amazing work. If you're reading this blog, the server software was written using this plugin - so I'm eating my own dogfood.

The one thing I'd like to get working is code-completion - this may require some hacking of the source indexer - I've been in touch with Tor to try to figure out where to dig to do that, but it may not be a trivial task.

The libraries customizer

How to get it

• You need a NetBeans Daily Build - from today (June 2, 2011) or later - I had to add some features to some of my other modules, so it will not work with 7.0
• In Tools | Plugins, it will be in the Available Plugins tab

Prerequisites

• Install Node - there are distros for most Unix-based OS's
• Install NPM - ditto

You can do without NPM at the start, but it's worth having - it's the world's simplest package manager, and tons of people publish libraries into it - so it's a great source of both useful things and good code examples.

Other Node Plugins

Before anyone asks, I'm aware that Syntea has a plugin that does the first two things on the feature list above. Since it's a Czech company and a NetBeans plugin, I'm guessing it's probably one of my former colleagues in Prague.

I did attempt - by twitter and email - to contact them to see if I could contribute to their plugin, but got no response.