Provide the ability to build a project created by NetBeans, without running or
even installing the IDE. This ability would be useful in the following scenarios:

1/ Mixed IDE environment, where a part of the team works with NetBeans, but
others on the team use some other IDE or just an editor (Emacs, JEdit).
Currently the only solution is to use freeform projects, which are very limited
in some respects). Having this ability would allow the NetBeans users to manage
the project metadata, and the other team members would just use the generated
Ant scripts.

2/ Open source projects, where the set of potential developers is not know, and
it can not be assumed that all of them use IDE. The vast majority of open source
projects provide an Ant script (or alternatively Maven script) that works out of
the box, or with minimal setup. This is currently not possible with
NetBeans-generated Ant scripts, as these do not work out of the box after CVS
checkout, and making them work is fairly difficult without the IDE.

3/ Distributing sample and example projects, where the primary focus is not on
usage in and IDE, but on the actual code they demonstrate. So in this case it is
unreasonable to expect that the users will download, install and run NetBeans to
build the project.


Currently, the NetBeans project system has the following limitations that make
it unsuitable for the above scenarios:

- Most projects created by the IDE are non-sharable, as they require resolving
broken references (to Java platform, libraries, servers etc.) after CVS checkout.
- Projects created by the IDE contain references to libraries and Ant task
definitions contained inside the IDE installation, so the IDE has to be
installed to build the project.

While more agressive use of relative paths (see issue 63267) made some aspects
of project sharing better, it is still far from ideal. In my opinion, the
correct behavior would be the following:

The IDE makes it possible and easy to create projects in the IDE that can be
checked into a versioning system, and after checking out on another machine, it
is possible to build and deploy them without running and even installing the IDE. 
Or at the very least, it is obvious what changes need to be done to make the
build work (e.g. the ant script writes "In file /some/path/build.properties,
please set the value of property sun.appserver.install.root to the directory
containing the installation of Sun Java System Application Server 8.1").