REVIEW: NetBeans IDE 6.7 Provides Effective Integration with Project Kenai

Issue Tracking

The Kenai Website hosts issue-tracking software (Bugzilla) that works just as well as many of the best around.

Right from within the NetBeans IDE, I could create issues and assign them to a developer, assign severities, and so on. You can also list all the open issues for the project in another window, from which you can click an issue and see the details and update the issue, adding comments, uploading attachments, you name it.

All of this worked pretty well in tests, and it’s tightly integrated right into the IDE. (Although, apparently by appending my employer’s initials—ZDE—to the end of my username, Bugzilla decided the “DE” was the standard abbreviation for Deutschland, or Germany and oddly defaulted to German for its language when I tried to access it.)

All in all, I had a good experience with the Kenai integration into NetBeans IDE.

Some parts aren’t totally integrated into the IDE, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. For example, each project in Kenai gets its own wiki. You can access the wiki from within NetBeans, but to accommodate this, NetBeans launches the default Web browser. That’s fine, though: It wouldn’t make much sense to have some kind of windowed interface into the wiki from within the browser.

Also, with these collaboration tools in NetBeans IDE, there’s a bit of a learning curve; I got stumped a couple times and had to read the online help. I recommend spending time on the Kenai.com site itself and becoming familiar with it before attempting to use the Kenai integration from within the NetBeans IDE. You’ll have a much easier time, as the functionality will make more sense.

Jeff Cogswell can be reached at jcogswell@eweek.com.