Re: How standard and interchangeable are XML config files?
Ramon F Herrera wrote:
How standard are those XML configuration files? Can a file created by
NetBeans be read and interpreted by Eclipse, and vice versa?
Arne VajhQj wrote:
Not standard at all.
The standards are ant and maven build files.
Bot Eclipse and NetBeans support ant build files.
Not only are project files not portable between IDEs, they're not portable
within the same IDE.
Project files contain very specific information about directory locations,
selected options, libraries and the like. Move a project even to a different
hard drive on the same computer, much less to another machine, much, much less
to a different IDE, and things break.
Here's a typical top-level project directory list from my own NetBeans workspace:
$ ls -1p
build/
build.xml
catalog.xml
CVS/
..cvsignore
dist/
logs/
nbproject/
src/
test/
web/
The .cvsignore file excludes the build/, dist/, and logs/ subdirectories. The
NetBeans-specific build.xml and the nbproject/ directories are checked into a
separate branch of the CVS project repository, not the trunk. Exports of
source to another project workspace, for deployment or parallel development,
always go through version control (VC), never directly between workspaces.
The nbproject branch does not go with them.
If there were multiple nbprojects going for one project, say, were there a
team involved, then each nbproject would go into a separate branch, with the
real project trees like src/ and web/ on the trunk. The workspaces would not
share nbproject branches.
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Lew