Filesystems and Application Development

See Also

To develop applications in the IDE, you need to determine the sources and libraries you want to work with and  them in the IDE as . Mounted filesystems can be viewed in the Filesystems window.

If you are developing an application that depends on other libraries, you must have those libraries mounted in the IDE in order to run the application within the IDE. If you do not need to actively work with a given directory or archive file, you can set it to be a hidden filesystem.

When you compile and run Java applications in the IDE, the IDE builds the class path from mounted directories and mounted JAR files. Even if you have the CLASSPATH environment variable set on your system, it is not referenced by the IDE. As a result, you need to mount every library that your application needs. Since the mounted filesystems correspond to the class path, any directories must be mounted at the package root to ensure that the sources are compilable and otherwise usable in the IDE.

By default, a sample directory is mounted and displayed in the Filesystems window. Some JAR files are also mounted but hidden from display.

You can configure each mounted filesystem separately. You can determine:

You can also configure whether a filesystem's files can be compiled, run, debugged, or used as Javadoc documentation in the IDE. For example, it might be useful to disable compilation for a library that your application depends on. The library might not need to be recompiled every time you compile your application.

You can also change the order of filesystems in the Filesystems window. Mount order is particularly significant if you have classes with identical, fully qualified names in different filesystems. When you select one of these identical classes to run or debug, the IDE runs the version of that class that appears highest in the Filesystems window.

See Also
Mounting a Filesystem
Changing the Mount Order of Filesystems
Opening a File Not in a Mounted Filesystem
Disabling Compilation for a Filesystem
Unmounting a Filesystem
Filesystems Window
Using Version Control in the IDE

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