This Bugzilla instance is a read-only archive of historic NetBeans bug reports. To report a bug in NetBeans please follow the project's instructions for reporting issues.
The non-free-form projects in NetBeans 4 all assume that you want to build a JAR or WAR file. This is completely unworkable for iterative development on existing semi-monolithic projects of >>100MB of classes. Also some existing development processes require this output form. NetBeans 3.6 supports such projects quite well (but it does not suppport not Java 5 and thus is on borrowed time). The solution is simple: provide options to both standard and web projects to have "build" output to a selected (new or existing) directory and *not* build a jar or war. Still provide separate Ant targets for jar and war creation -- just don't make "build" include these actions. Also, the output directory should be the project's "output" for purposes of dependent projects. Yes, all of this can be done via Ant, but this is a *huge* regression in simple, beginner-level functionality from 3.6. Users will give up on NB4 rather than figuring out how to do this all in Ant themselves!
An enhancement. Whuch might save some time on very large projects.
Might save some time??? How about hours out of the day? Not to mention the fact that the desired/required output is a directory of classes, not a JAR or WAR. NB 4 simply fails to support this use case at all out-of-the-box (i.e. without customization via Ant). This is a substantial regression in functionality from NB 3.6. It might not fit into the pretty simplified NB 4 vision so nicely, but that's real life.
The modification of the build.xml should be fairly simple.
*** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 46721 ***