Netbeans running multimodule Maven project

Question

I've recently tried to work with NetBeans and I don't understand how it handles Maven multi-module projects.

My project has fairly complicated modules structure and when we're working on it (we mainly use IntelliJ community edition) we don't want to open all its modules (~50 modules) because it will take hours to load the project, instead we've created a 'workspace' module: a folder with pom.xml that has a packaging type pom and defines modules that I would like to load.

Lets say it defines modules A, B, C.

We have our main method (we don't use any type of container) in module A which is a low-level infrastructure module.

As a runtime dependency we need A, B, C. But A doesn't really depend on B, C, but rather B and C depend on A (in terms of Maven dependencies).

So we've created another module, lets call it runner, where we define all the dependencies. Our workspace pom.xml has module declaration of runner, so in order to run the project from IntelliJ, we use a 'classpath of module runner' while running method main in module A.

Now, How can I achieve the same affect with the latest Netbeans (7.1.2)?

I understand that question is kind of newbie's style, but I struggle with it a lot of time with no luck.

Answer 1

Just struggled with the same issue - from what's listed in the Netbeans wiki it seems that every module represents it's own Netbeans project and everything else would be expressed with project dependencies. See http://wiki.netbeans.org/MavenBestPractices

A project with modules is known as a multimodule, or aggregator project. Modules are projects that this POM lists, and are executed as a group. The Maven projects in NetBeans lists these modules as "Required Projects". So you will only get the required projects list populated for Maven projects with "pom" packaging that have modules defined.