Facelets Support in NetBeans 6.1

After getting Seam working by manually deploying a .war, I moved onto the next step of integrating Seam into an IDE. Eclipse is a clunky heap of rubbish. I'd say its problem is that it is too flexible. There's a million ways to do one simple thing, but no single way to do one simple thing properly.

After serveral hours wasted on Eclipse, I moved over to NetBeans (6.1). There's a great little tutorial on getting your NetBeans environment setup over at Edem Morny's tech blog. Everything went smoothely, up to the part where one installs Facelets Support, where I get this nasty little message:

Missing required modules for Plugin Facelets Support:
JSP Parser [module org.netbeans.modules.web.jspparser/3 = 200805300101]

This can be avoided by not updating NetBeans. Fortunately there is a bit of a hack to get around this issue:
1. Go to your netbeans-6.1/enterprise5/modules directory
2. Unjar the org-netbeans-modules-web-jspparser.jar file

jar xf org-netbeans-modules-web-jspparser.jar

3. Create a backup of the orignal org-netbeans-modules-web-jspparser.jar just in case.
4. Edit the META-INF/MANIFEST.MF file.
5. Change the OpenIDE-Module-Implementation-Version: to match the verion the facelet is complaining about. In this instance 200805300101.
6. Save the file and jar the whole thing again (by explicitly adding the modified manifest file)

jar cfm org-netbeans-modules-web-jspparser.jar META-INF/MANIFEST.MF org