NetBeans Template Configurer

Many years ago, I wrote a post about how to use the NetBeans template system for my students. It quickly covered the basics and demonstrated how to set things up for the course’s documentation standard.

In Fall 2017, one of the UAB EE333 Project teams built a clever tool to do this initialization for the student. This makes it much easier for the new student to set up the automation at the beginning before they have any real experience with NetBeans. The tool solicits the data needed (student name, email, course) and installs the templates.

It has been tested on both Windows 10 and Mac OS 10.12 with NetBeans 8.2 and attempts to work with earlier and later versions of things but that is mostly outside the testing space. The team consisting of

• Dylan Dalton
• Schauber Gbalou
• Matthew Manuel
• Joey Richardson
• Darrin Wang

have agreed to having the source code of their tool on GitHub under a MIT license. UAB students should be able to find a compiled version of the code in the form of a templates.jar file in their course Learning Management System.

The students cleverly put the basic templates (modified versions of the ones in NetBeans) in the jar file as resources allowing one to modify the templates as desired but only have to distribute a jar file to new students. We placed the code into Github.