Tim Boudreau On The Future of NetBeans

maffstephens writes "With the release of NetBeans 4.0 set to reignite the open-source Java IDE war and all sorts of cool developments on the horizon, it seemed like a very good time to talk to one of the key senior NetBeans developers. In this interview, Tim Boudreau (co-author of NetBeans: The Definitive Guide) speaks candidly about his views on rival IDE Eclipse, the future of NetBeans, and the thinking behind its new Ant-based projects system."

Comments

Re:Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm indifferent to both netbeans and eclipse, as I don't particularly like java and don't need to write it at my new job.

But IBM Eclipse really annoyed me, not because they chose to write a different IDE with strong similarties to the already-existing but not IBM-controlled (eclipse, block out the sun, geddit? hur hur) netbeans, though that annoyed the Sun fanboys.

No, what annoyed me was eclipse's complete disregard for existing open standard specifications for IDE plugins, helpers etc.. While they mostly came from netbeans, they were not tied to netbeans any more than some apache apis are tied to apache just because they have org.apache in their draft versions. They could have worked with sun and maybe borland to build a vendor-neutral plugin model for Eclipse/Websphere, NetBeans/Forte and Borland's thingy, but they had to re-invent wheels so that they could claim to own them...

Netbeans Eclipse Emacs - the saga

[tod_miller]

I started using Netbeans waaay back in the day, I had a few problems, but I liked the interface. I made the arduous chance to Eclipse, and it took a while, but slowly I got used to Eclipse.

I always wanted to go back to Netbeans to see what they had, but always Eclipse was good enough - now!

And the refactoring blew me away, and speed, and SWeeTness.

The CVS integration was quirky since the beginning (when I used it) then matured. I have been using a 2003 build until about month ago, and I was almost lost again using it.

Well, I thought that was time ot check out Netbeans again, but I started developing some code out of office, and found myself using a twisted up machine at a local university - I smacked emacs and cygwin on, and after a couple of days hitting [End] instead of C^e I got into it...

Now I use emacs at work... it is like having a colonic for your mind... it cleans out all those things you were thinking about, and gets you back to the code level.

I still love eclipse and have about a million templates that go az, azz, azzz, qaz, qazza, zxc, zxczxc for doing all sorts of wierd and wonderful shortcuts. I love the accessibility of the information I need about libraries and attaching source to a .jar you have on the classpath. [rather than *mounting* source in netbeans.]

I have had about ~4 crashes in my workspace in one week when using some large projects (on a nightly I just happened to get):

so my dir looks like:

workspace
workspace_
workspace_backup
workspa ce_bust
workspace_working_ :-)

I think using C^x-f and finding the source you need quickly, search the method name, read the method, is a bit more holistic then using the f3 all the time in eclipse...

So in one sense I love Eclipse, and always will, I shed many a tear for Netbeans, and promise myself to reinstall it. I hate JDeveloper 9, JBuilder I only used at The Big U, and EditPlus never fails!

For now I use emacs.

Which is more useful?

[Zach Garner]

From the interview, it seems that they are saying that Sun's NetBeans came up with the great ideas first, but had a bad implementation. So bad, that many who tried NetBeans until after 3.5 (there on 4.0 right now) had such a bad user experience that they wouldn't consider using it again.

Meanwhile, IBM properly funded eclipse, properly marketed it, attracted a strong user base that provides many plugins, and as a result has become the winner of the two.

Trying not to sound like flamebait, but this sounds like a few other things Sun has done. For instance, Swing is not a bad idea, but long standing bugs, missing components and an initially buggy and slow product have led many to never consider Java for desktop development.

So, a question for those that have used a recent version of NetBeans: Despite all of the flaws that were mentioned in the interview (many/most of them were mentioned only to say "it's been fixed in 4.0"), is NetBeans more useful than Eclipse?

Are there plugins for Ant, Checkstyle, FindBugs, Bugzilla, etc, like there are for Eclipse? What about subversion support?

Without that support, NetBeans will not be useful to me, unfortunately.

Re:Which is more useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eclipse has clearly won. Permanently.

Even if Sun threw their entire marketing department at NetBeans, it'd probably hurt more than it helps.

And NetBeans is a very silly name. Eclipse sounds sophisticated by comparison.

DISCLAIMER: I don't use either of them. I use vim