5.3.2.2.6 Build and Deploy the Application
The main build command in the NetBeans IDE is the Clean and Build Main Project command. This command deletes previously compiled classes and other build artifacts and then rebuilds the entire project from scratch.
Perform the following operations to build the application:
1) Click on the Run > Clean and Build Main Project(SumApp) menu item (Shift-F11).
2) Output from the Ant build script appears in the Output window. If the Output window does not appear, you can open it manually by choosing Window > Output.
3) When you clean and build your project, the following things occur:
a. Output folders that have been generated by previous build actions are deleted (“cleaned”). In most cases, these are the build and dist folders.
b. The build and dist folders are added to your project folder, hereafter referred to as the PROJECT_HOME folder.
c. All of the sources are compiled into. class files, which are placed into the PROJECT_ HOME/build folder.
d. A JAR file, SumApp.jar, containing your project is created inside the PROJECT_ HOME/dist folder.
e. If you have specified any libraries for the project (SumLib.jar in this case), a lib folder is created in the dist folder. The libraries are copied into dist/lib folder.
f. The manifest file in the JAR is updated to include entries that designate the main class and any libraries that are on the project’s classpath.
Manifest-Version: 1.0
Ant-Version: Apache Ant 1.10.4
Created-By: 14.0.1 + 7 (Oracle Corporation)
Class-Path: lib/SumLib.jar
X-COMMENT: Main-Class will be added automatically by build
Main-Class: sumapp.Main
After building and deploying the application, now we can run this application outside the
NetBeans IDE. To do that, perform the following operations:
1) On your system, open a command prompt or terminal window.
2) At the command prompt, change directories to the SumApp/dist directory.
3) At the command line, type the following statement:
java -jar SumApp.jar 12, 34, 56
The application then executes and returns the output, as shown in Figure 5.22.