Will's Blog

For the past year Universal G-code Sender has suffered pretty severe feature creep. Lots of people had lots of good ideas, but it made the front end code confusing and hard to extend. In large part this is just because it's hard to compartmentalize a complex GUI. GRBL has had a lot of interesting features added in the past year which are begging to be leveraged, but UGS wasn't in a position to use them. With all this in mind I started trying to come up with a solution. The first step was to decouple the "model" object from the GUI. Inspiration for this started nearly a year ago when Bob Jones implemented a web interface for UGS. Bob made a thin API layer which exposed a few simple functions and allowed him to build a completely separate web-based user interface. This pattern is known as Model-View-Presenter , and allows for multiple front ends which use the same back end code. It enhances test-ability of the business logic and helps facilitate a flexible front end...

I've been converting UGS to run on the  Netbeans Platform  over the past week, and in general its been great.  The features and documentation I used while migrating UGS away from Swing were very well done. So aside from a couple hiccups, the Netbeans Platform has been great. Until a few days ago when I decided it was time to integrate my new changes with my Jenkins CI server. It turns out that you can't build a Netbeans Platform application without connecting to the Netbeans IDE first. This has to do with the extra modules, platform components and build harness. Searching the subject online provides a lot of documentation, everything I've found is either out dated, contradictory, or I could only get it working with a new project and not my existing one. The final solution was so simple, and minimally invasive that I wanted to create this blog post. There are 4 interesting files for a Netbeans Platform build: build.xml  - Some documentation suggests addin...