blog/netbeans.html

<!DOCTYPE html>     <html class="no-js"> <head> <meta charset='utf-8'/><meta http-equiv='X-UA-Compatible' content='IE=edge'/><meta name='viewport' content='width=device-width, initial-scale=1'/><meta name='keywords' content='netbeans, groovy, apache, debug, gradle'/><meta name='description' content='This post looks at using NetBeans and Groovy.'/><title>The Apache Groovy programming language - Blogs - Using Apache NetBeans with Apache Groovy™</title><link href='../img/favicon.ico' type='image/x-ico' rel='icon'/><script src='../js/matomo.js'></script><link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='../css/bootstrap.css'/><link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='../css/font-awesome.min.css'/><link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='../css/style.css'/><link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='../css/../css/prettify.min.css'/> </head><body> <div id='fork-me'> <a href='https://github.com/apache/groovy'> <img style='position: fixed; top: 20px; right: -58px; border: 0; z-index: 100; transform: rotate(45deg);' src='../img/horizontal-github-ribbon.png'/> </a> </div><div id='st-container' class='st-container st-effect-9'> <nav class='st-menu st-effect-9' id='menu-12'> <h2 class='icon icon-lab'>Socialize</h2><ul> <li> <a href='https://groovy-lang.org/mailing-lists.html' class='icon'><span class='fa fa-envelope'></span> Discuss on the mailing-list</a> </li><li> <a href='https://twitter.com/ApacheGroovy' class='icon'><span class='fa fa-twitter'></span> Groovy on Twitter</a> </li><li> <a href='https://groovy-lang.org/events.html' class='icon'><span class='fa fa-calendar'></span> Events and conferences</a> </li><li> <a href='https://github.com/apache/groovy' class='icon'><span class='fa fa-github'></span> Source code on GitHub</a> </li><li> <a href='https://groovy-lang.org/reporting-issues.html' class='icon'><span class='fa fa-bug'></span> Report issues in Jira</a> </li><li> <a href='http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/groovy' class='icon'><span class='fa fa-stack-overflow'></span> Stack Overflow questions</a> </li><li> <a href='http://www.groovycommunity.com/' class='icon'><span class='fa fa-slack'></span> Slack Community</a> </li> </ul> </nav><div class='st-pusher'> <div class='st-content'> <div class='st-content-inner'> <div><div class='navbar navbar-default navbar-static-top' role='navigation'> <div class='container'> <div class='navbar-header'> <button type='button' class='navbar-toggle' data-toggle='collapse' data-target='.navbar-collapse'> <span class='sr-only'></span><span class='icon-bar'></span><span class='icon-bar'></span><span class='icon-bar'></span> </button><a class='navbar-brand' href='../index.html'> <i class='fa fa-star'></i> Apache Groovy™ </a> </div><div class='navbar-collapse collapse'> <ul class='nav navbar-nav navbar-right'> <li class=''><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/learn.html'>Learn</a></li><li class=''><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/documentation.html'>Documentation</a></li><li class=''><a href='/download.html'>Download</a></li><li class=''><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/support.html'>Support</a></li><li class=''><a href='/'>Contribute</a></li><li class=''><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/ecosystem.html'>Ecosystem</a></li><li class=''><a href='/blog'>Blog posts</a></li><li class=''><a href='https://groovy.apache.org/events.html'></a></li><li> <a data-effect='st-effect-9' class='st-trigger' href='#'>Socialize</a> </li><li class=''> <a href='../search.html'> <i class='fa fa-search'></i> </a> </li> </ul> </div> </div> </div><div id='content' class='page-1'><div class='row'><div class='row-fluid'><div class='col-lg-3'><ul class='nav-sidebar'><li><a href='./'>Blog index</a></li><li class='active'><a href='#doc'>Using Apache NetBeans with Apache Groovy™</a></li></ul><br/><ul class='nav-sidebar'><li style='padding: 0.35em 0.625em; background-color: #eee'><span>Related posts</span></li><li><a href='./parsing-json-with-groovy'>Parsing JSON with Groovy™</a></li><li><a href='./groovy-null-processing'>Groovy™ Processing Nulls In Lists</a></li><li><a href='./detecting-objects-with-groovy-the'>Detecting objects with Groovy™, the Deep Java Library (DJL), and Apache MXNet</a></li><li><a href='./groovy-list-processing-cheat-sheet'>Groovy™ List Processing Cheat Sheet</a></li></ul></div><div class='col-lg-8 col-lg-pull-0'><a name='doc'></a><h1>Using Apache NetBeans with Apache Groovy™</h1><p><div style='display:flex;padding:0.2ex'><span>Author: </span> <a href="https://github.com/paulk-asert/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img style="border-radius:50%;height:48px;width:auto" src="img/paulk-asert.png" alt="Paul King"></a> <div style="display:grid;align-items:center;margin:0.1ex;padding:0ex"> <div><a href="https://github.com/paulk-asert/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><span>Paul King</span></a></div> <div><small><i>PMC Member</i></small></div> </div> </div><br/><span>Published: 2025-02-25 10:15PM</span></p><hr/><div class="quoteblock"> <blockquote> <div class="paragraph"> <p><span class="blue"><em>Let’s try using the latest Apache NetBeans with Apache Groovy.</em></span></p> </div> </blockquote> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>The <a href="https://netbeans.apache.org/">Apache NetBeans</a> project recently <a href="https://netbeans.apache.org/front/main/blogs/entry/announce-apache-netbeans-25-released/">announced</a> the release of Apache NetBeans 25. Let’s take it for a spin with <a href="https://groovy.apache.org/">Apache Groovy</a>.</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>We’ll assume you have downloaded it as per the <a href="https://netbeans.apache.org/front/main/download/nb25/">NetBeans download page</a>. If you haven’t used NetBeans with Groovy before, you might need to enable to Groovy plugin. Select <code>Tools → Plugins → Installed</code>, Check <code>Groovy</code> and click on <code>Activate</code>, when finished, you should see a screen like this:</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p><span class="image"><img src="img/nb_enable_groovy_plugin.png" alt="enabling the groovy plugin" width="600"></span></p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>Next, we are going to create a new project, select <code>File → New Project… → Groovy with Gradle</code>.</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p><span class="image"><img src="img/nb_create_groovy_application.png" alt="creating a new project" width="600"></span></p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>Select <code>Groovy Application</code> then click <code>Next</code>.</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>Now, fill in the project details:</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p><span class="image"><img src="img/nb_new_application_details.png" alt="entering project details" width="600"></span></p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>We are going to create a little script that uses some fraction functionality from the <a href="https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-numbers/">Apache Commons Number</a> library. We’ll call the project fractions. Click <code>Finish</code> when ready.</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>This now creates a partially filled out project using the Gradle <code>init</code> task. It defines some useful libraries, sets up <code>test</code> and <code>main</code> source sets for us, creates a versions catalog, and creates an <code>app</code> subproject. It has set up some nice dependencies like the <a href="https://spockframework.org/">Spock testing framework</a>, but we won’t use that in this post.</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>So, for our little script, we’ll prune back the dependencies to just those we need. The versions toml file becomes:</p> </div> <div class="listingblock"> <div class="content"> <pre class="prettyprint highlight"><code data-lang="toml">[versions] groovy = "3.0.22" commons-numbers-fraction = "1.2" [libraries] groovy = { module = "org.codehaus.groovy:groovy", version.ref = "groovy" } numbers-fraction = { module = "org.apache.commons:commons-numbers-fraction", version.ref = "commons-numbers-fraction" }</code></pre> </div> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>We’ll also prune the Gradle build file slightly to this:</p> </div> <div class="listingblock"> <div class="content"> <pre class="prettyprint highlight"><code data-lang="groovy">plugins { id 'groovy' id 'application' } repositories { mavenCentral() } dependencies { implementation libs.groovy implementation libs.numbers.fraction } java { toolchain { languageVersion = JavaLanguageVersion.of(21) } } application { mainClass = 'App' }</code></pre> </div> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>We can now create our script. It’s just one <em>import</em> statement and then one line of code:</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p><span class="image"><img src="img/nb_simple_fractions_script.png" alt="NetBeans IDE showing simple script"></span></p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>Running the script shows the expected output of <code>5 / 6</code>. The fractions library is good at getting exact results which might otherwise be prone to rounding errors.</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>Let’s try a bit of Groovy fun. We’ll define a category to make working with fractions a little nicer. Groovy supports a number of <em>metapgramming</em> mechanisms that let you add methods to classes at compile time or runtime. In this case, we’ll add a <code>div</code> method to the <code>Integer</code> class and a <code>plus</code> method to the <code>Fraction</code> class. These happen to be methods designed to work with Groovy’s operator overloading.</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>The <code>use</code> method lets us apply this change to a select code block. That way we won’t impact using the <code>Integer</code> and <code>Fraction</code> classes without these changes in other places.</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p><span class="image"><img src="img/nb_script_with_category.png" alt="NetBeans IDE showing script with category"></span></p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>The magic is in the code fragment <code>println 1 / 3 + 1 / 2</code>. The expression <code>1 / 3</code> works like a factory method for fractions. The <code>+</code> operator adds the fractions.</p> </div> <div class="admonitionblock note"> <table> <tr> <td class="icon"> <div class="title">Note</div> </td> <td class="content"> As an aside, Groovy’s compiler configuration and scripting support means that we could hide away the definition of the <code>FractionCategory</code> class and the <code>use</code> call if we wanted to, leaving a script with just the <code>println 1 / 3 + 1 / 2</code> statement. This might be appropriate if we were setting up an environment for data scientists to write script with fractions. </td> </tr> </table> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>But we haven’t finished yet. IDE’s should let us debug our code. Let’s put a breakpoint on the statement in the <code>plus</code> method of the <code>FractionCategory</code> class, and then run with debug.</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p><span class="image"><img src="img/nb_debug.png" alt="NetBeans IDE showing script debugging"></span></p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>Execution has halted. We can inspect the <code>self</code> and <code>other</code> variables and add watch expressions like <code>other.doubleValue()</code>.</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>The default Groovy version generated by the Gradle init invocation earlier was the latest Groovy 3 version. But we can easily change that. Let’s swap to Groovy 5 (currently in alpha releases) and look at a new Groovy 5 feature, the <code>OperatorRename</code> AST transform.</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>If provides an alternative to our earlier category. Simplify slightly, it changes operator overloading in early parsing. You can use operator overloading in the source code, and it is renamed to normal method calls, removing the need for subsequent metaprogramming.</p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p><span class="image"><img src="img/nb_groovy5.png" alt="using Groovy 5"></span></p> </div> <div class="paragraph"> <p>So, the <code>+</code> in the assert statement at line 6 is converted into an <code>add</code> method call instead of Groovy’s normal <code>plus</code> operator overloading method call. You can read more about this new feature in the <a href="https://groovy-lang.org/releasenotes/groovy-5.0.html">Groovy 5 release notes</a>.</p> </div></div></div></div></div><footer id='footer'> <div class='row'> <div class='colset-3-footer'> <div class='col-1'> <h1>Groovy</h1><ul> <li><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/learn.html'>Learn</a></li><li><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/documentation.html'>Documentation</a></li><li><a href='/download.html'>Download</a></li><li><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/support.html'>Support</a></li><li><a href='/'>Contribute</a></li><li><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/ecosystem.html'>Ecosystem</a></li><li><a href='/blog'>Blog posts</a></li><li><a href='https://groovy.apache.org/events.html'></a></li> </ul> </div><div class='col-2'> <h1>About</h1><ul> <li><a href='https://github.com/apache/groovy'>Source code</a></li><li><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/security.html'>Security</a></li><li><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/learn.html#books'>Books</a></li><li><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/thanks.html'>Thanks</a></li><li><a href='http://www.apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html'>Sponsorship</a></li><li><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/faq.html'>FAQ</a></li><li><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/search.html'>Search</a></li> </ul> </div><div class='col-3'> <h1>Socialize</h1><ul> <li><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/mailing-lists.html'>Discuss on the mailing-list</a></li><li><a href='https://twitter.com/ApacheGroovy'>Groovy on Twitter</a></li><li><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/events.html'>Events and conferences</a></li><li><a href='https://github.com/apache/groovy'>Source code on GitHub</a></li><li><a href='https://groovy-lang.org/reporting-issues.html'>Report issues in Jira</a></li><li><a href='http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/groovy'>Stack Overflow questions</a></li><li><a href='http://www.groovycommunity.com/'>Slack Community</a></li> </ul> </div><div class='col-right'> <p> The Groovy programming language is supported by the <a href='http://www.apache.org'>Apache Software Foundation</a> and the Groovy community. </p><div text-align='right'> <img src='../img/asf_logo.png' title='The Apache Software Foundation' alt='The Apache Software Foundation' style='width:60%'/> </div><p>Apache, Apache Groovy, Groovy, and the Apache feather logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation.</p> </div> </div><div class='clearfix'>© 2003-2025 the Apache Groovy project — Groovy is Open Source: <a href='http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html' alt='Apache 2 License'>license</a>, <a href='https://privacy.apache.org/policies/privacy-policy-public.html'>privacy policy</a>.</div> </div> </footer></div> </div> </div> </div> </div><script src='../js/vendor/jquery-1.10.2.min.js' defer></script><script src='../js/vendor/classie.js' defer></script><script src='../js/vendor/bootstrap.js' defer></script><script src='../js/vendor/sidebarEffects.js' defer></script><script src='../js/vendor/modernizr-2.6.2.min.js' defer></script><script src='../js/plugins.js' defer></script><script src='../js/vendor/prettify.min.js'></script><script>document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded',prettyPrint)</script> </body></html>

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