String constants for NetBeans project types

Question

I am developing a plugin for NetBeans 8.0 and I created a LookupProvider which is registered like that:

@LookupProvider.Registration(projectType = {
  "org-netbeans-modules-ant-freeform",
  "org-netbeans-modules-j2ee-archiveproject",
  "org-netbeans-modules-j2ee-clientproject",
  "org-netbeans-modules-j2ee-earproject",
  "org-netbeans-modules-j2ee-ejbjarproject",
  "org-netbeans-modules-java-j2seproject",
  "org-netbeans-modules-maven",
  "org-netbeans-modules-web-clientproject",
  "org-netbeans-modules-web-project"
})

I would like to know if there is the possibility to reference the project types from a constant (which is already defined by the NetBeans platform) or do I really have to declare them as strings (like org-netbeans-modules-web-clientproject)?

Answer 1

I believe there are constants for these but the question is if you really want to depend on them. Oftentimes the constants are hidden in the project type's own module that doesn't provider API packages or provides them only to friends. And typically your own primary dependency is on the interface that you implement and put into the lookup. There could be some sort of master list in a public package somewhere but that could always just list the subset of project types. Also please note that for maven you can actually have an unlimited number of constants as we support only registering your LP to a given maven packaging type.