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The Perils of Upgrading
I’ve just had a very frustrating day trying to upgrade my Netbeans installation to version 6.5. I have a new J2ME project for a client that required the latest version of the Sprint Wireless Toolkit (3.3.2). It has been a while since I last worked with Netbeans so I figured upgrading all the components to the latest version would be in order. I would need the latest JDK as well (version 6, update 12) so that everything would be up-to-date. I spent an hour or so grabbing all the necessary files and running the installers, only to find that the shiny new Netbeans would no longer let me add a new MIDP platform to the project. All of the right buttons were there, but when I clicked ‘Next’ to choose the directory where the Sprint WTK resides, nothing happened. I had to cancel the dialog and finally I noticed the little red ’something went wrong’ icon in the lower-right corner of the Netbeans window. Clicking on it revealed that a null pointer error had led to the badness I was seeing.
Needless to say I was very disappointed, and I ended up spending the rest of the afternoon trying various things to resolve the issue. The final solution was to downgrade back to JDK 6 update 11. Unfortunately the only way I could get my hands on the JDK 6 update 11 installer was to re-download the version of Netbeans that came bundled with it. Wouldn’t it be nice if Sun provided stand-alone access to previous versions of JDK 6? Anyway, I would recommend sticking with update 11 for a while if you’re using the Mobility plug-ins, especially if you are moving projects around.