NbMavenize

The script was written to migrate JJazzLab, an Ant-based Netbeans platform application (~70 modules) to Maven.

The script expects the Netbeans platform projects to have a standard structure. You can just create an empty Maven project using the Netbeans IDE "New project" command for a "Netbeans application".

AntApp/
  nbproject/
  branding/
  module1/
     manifest.mf
     src/
     nbproject/
        project.xml
        project.properties
        ...
     ...
  module2/
     ...
  ...

MavenApp/
  pom.xml
  application/
     pom.xml
     ...
  branding/
     ...
  ...

Usage

Example: nbMavenize.sh AntApp/module2 MavenApp

The imported module is stored in the modules subdirectory of the Maven parent project.

The main operations are:

• Copy module source and resource files
• Copy and adapt module manifest.mf file
• Update parent/pom.xml and application/pom.xml
• Create the module pom.xml file with the appropriate public packages and dependencies

Note that the parent and application pom.xml files are updated only if necessary, so it's safe to run the script repeatedly.

Limitations

The script does not handle all possible cases, though it scans the source project to inform you about possible MANUAL ACTIONS NEEDED to be performed post-script (e.g. for Ant "library wrapper modules", or when the release subdirectory is used).

Other tasks you must perform yourself:

• Add dependencies for unit tests
• If an Ant module uses customized compiler settings (defined in module/nbproject/project.properties, e.g. javac.compilerargs), you need to manually update the corresponding pom file to configure the maven-compiler-plugin accordingly.
• Copy the core and modules subdirectories from AntApp/branding to MavenApp/branding/src/main/nbm-branding
• ...

Useful links

I learnt Maven while doing this migration, I found those links very useful:

• https://maven.apache.org/pom.html
• https://github.com/gephi/gephi