NetBeans IDE 6.7 Provides Effective Integration with Project Kenai

I just read this review on eWeek about NetBeans integration with Project Kenai. As I understand Project Kenai is some repository similar to Sourceforge and Google Code just by Sun. Obviously it has a web based interface but now, the latest version of the NetBeans IDE provides an integrated interface to it. So right from the IDE you can search for projects, check them out from their repository and start working on them.

This got me dreaming.

Padre will soon provide a way to search CPAN and install modules right from the GUI. As some of the modules already provide links to their version control system listed in the META.yml we could integrate that too to Padre. So when looking at a module Padre could already recognize if it has a link to a version control system and offer you to check it out.

If there is no version control system, Padre should be able to setup one for you and import the latest version of the module so you can start hacking on it right away. There was an article in the Winter 2008 edition of The Perl Review on how to do this with Git. We could take that approach and make it integrated into Padre. We could also implement a similar process for Subversion.