Saturday, January 31, 2009

NetBeans 6.5 Installation

Installation of NetBeans 6.5 requires Java Development Kit 5 or Java Development Kit 6 as a pre-requisite. You can download the required JDK from http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/.

The installation procedure of NetBeans is the same in Windows, Linux and Solaris. Since NetBeans is written in Java, it is platform-independent and the installation User-Interface is also same in any operating system. NetBeans 6.5 is available as binaries for all the three Operating Systems - Windows, Linux and Solaris. Download it from http://www.netbeans.org/.

Start the installation by either double-clicking the .exe file in Windows or running the .sh file in Linux and Solaris from the Terminal. This starts the GUI based installation of NetBeans 6.5. Initially it takes a few seconds to configure the installer. The best part of NetBeans is its flexibility. It allows the user to install whatever is required, instead of installing everything. There are few runtimes which are selected by default.

Click on the customize button to select the runtimes which you need. The customize button also gives brief information about each component which is being installed. Also the GlassFish app-server and the Apache Tomcat web-server can also be installed as a part of NetBeans. Accept the license agreement.

Specify the installation directory of NetBeans. Also specify the directory where JDK is installed, the JDK directory is generally recognized by the installer itself. If you customized the installer to install GlassFish v2, the installer will prompt for the required parameters for GlassFish v2. These include the directory path, the admin username and password and the 3 ports - HTTP, HTTPS and admin. All these parameters are initialized to their default values.

Similarly, if you customized the installer for GlassFish v3, specify its directory path. Also, if you customized the installer for Apache Tomcat, specify its directory path.

The installer finally gives a summary of all the components which are to be installed, if you are satisfied with the customized components, start the installation. The installation will take some time depending on your system configuration and the components which are being installed.

Once the installation is complete, the installer will prompt you for registration. It is recommended that users register as there are a lot of offers available for registered users. However the choice of registration is left to the users. That’s it, NetBeans 6.5 is up and ready to use.

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