Netbean's Project Structure

Question

Hi I am using Netbeans for quite a while, But still I am not familiar with the Netbeans's project structure and other things like Ant, Maven, different xml files, manifest etc etc.

Can anyone redirect me to any other resources or any book that's gonna give me a very basic insight about what all of this things means and how they all fit together.

EDIT I have googled about each topic but, they give me an idea about what they are. But, I dont understand how they fit together.

Say, in A NB project, there are 4 items, inside the project folder

• nbproject (folder)
• src (I understand this hold just the packages in a folder-ed fashion)
• build.xml
• manifest.mf

I dont understand, what this build.xml and manifest.mf file does

inside nbproject

• private (hold netbeans preference info)
• build-impl.xml
• genfiles.properties
• project.properties
• project.xml

I guess these xml files are some sort of a script, but how they work and when, what the feed into is unknown to me.

Answer 1

build.xml - Contains instructions to build your application. You need to learn about Ant to understand the content.

manifest.mf - Is information that will end up in the jar produced as part of compiling your project. You need to search Java documentation for more explanation. Typically, you don't need to fiddle with these files.

project.properties project.xml - These contain general information about your project in NetBeans (i.e., things which are not really related to the compilation process -> Preferences, etc...).

In general, you don't need to worry about these files. NetBeans takes care of them.