2.4. Creating a Project with NetBeans
Vaadin has no official plugin for NetBeans at the moment, so the tasks have to be done more manually than with Eclipse.
You have two choices to create a Vaadin project in NetBeans: as a regular web application project or as a Maven project. We cover these both ways in the following sections.
This section describes the basic way of creating a Vaadin application project in NetBeans. This approach is useful if you do not wish to use Maven, but requires more manual work.
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Open → .
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Select → and click .
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Give a project name, such as
myproject. As the project name is by default also used as the context path, it should contain only alphanumerics, underscore and minus sign. Click . -
Select a server. The reference toolchain recommends Apache Tomcat, as many instructions in this book are given specifically for Tomcat, but any other server should work just as fine. Click .
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Click .
The project is created. However, it is a simple skeleton for a JSP-based web application project. To make it a proper Vaadin project, you need to include the Vaadin library, create the application class, and define the web.xml deployment descriptor.
Creating a Maven project with the Vaadin archetype is simpler than as a normal web application project in NetBeans. It creates an application skeleton, defines the web.xml deployment descriptor, and also retrieves the latest Vaadin library automatically.
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Select → .
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Select → and click .
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Select an archetype from a repository:
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If you have used Vaadin with Maven before, you might already have the archetype in local repository - select Archetypes from Local Repository.
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Add a new archetype by clicking . For Group Id, given
com.vaadin. For Artifact Id, givevaadin-archetype-cleanfor a normal project,vaadin-archetype-widgetfor a custom GWT widget project, orvaadin-archetype-samplefor a more advanced application skeleton. For Version, giveLATESTor a specific version number. Then, click .
Then select the Custom archetype - vaadin-archetype-clean (LATEST) from the selection tree.
Click Next.
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In the Name and Location step, enter Project Name, which is recommended to be only lower-case alphabetics, as it is used also as a suggestion for the Java package name of the project. Modify the other parameters for your project and click .
Creating the project can take a while as Maven loads all the needed dependencies. Once created, you can run it by right-clicking on the project in the Projects view and selecting Run. In the Select deployment server window that opens, select Apache Tomcat and click . If all goes well, NetBeans starts the server and launches the default browser to display the web application.