The O’Reilly book is old (written between 2001 and 2002) - the chapters on architectural background will still work, but many of the examples won’t.

The generation of NB it was written for is from before Lookup (see DevFaqLookup) was in use. TopManager was a class with a bunch of static methods for getting service objects. It is now gone.

For pretty much everything available via TopManager, simply take the class you were looking for and try SomeClass.getDefault() - that’s typically the modern way to do this sort of thing. TopManager caused a tangle of interdependencies between different APIs that it was very desirable to remove.

If you were calling TopManager.getDefault().getPlaces().nodes().projectDesktop() in a NetBeans 3.x based application, there is no direct equivalent in NB 4.0 and later. Rather, there is a rich set of project-related APIs which can be used for various purposes. As a rule, there is no 1-to-1 conversion from the above idiom to NB 4.0+; the affected O’Reilly examples would need to be rewritten to make sense today.

Applies to: NetBeans 4.0+