Netbeans 6 Dual-Licensed Under GPLv2, CDDL

Lally Singh writes "Interested in the new Netbeans 6, but didn't trust Sun's (already OSI-approved) CDDL? Sun just Dual-Licensed it under the GPL (v2) with Classpath Exception. Keep your karmic license purity and mix in all the (now compatible) GPL code you want. If you've been using Eclipse, Netbeans 6 is really worth a look. Lean, well-featured, and fast."

Comments

Dual license?

[4D6963]

Wait, you can dual-license something? How does that work, I mean, for example if I license a program with both GPLv2 and BSD, do people who use my code have to make theirs GPL or not?

Re:Dual license?

[4D6963]

Err, nevermind, the answer's in TFA (people choose the license they want) :-/

Re:Dual license?

[eht]

If it's your code you can license it however you want, for example MySQL is dual licensed under both the GPL and a Commercial license. Anyone can download the GPL version make their modifications and as long as they follow the GPL redistribute according to the GPl, or if they license the commercial version for a fee from MySQL AB they can basically release a closed source version all closed up.

If you were to dual license your code under the GPL and BSD people who wanted to redistribute modified code could follow either one they wanted, with BSD being one of the avaible choices they could close it up a lot if they so desired.

Re:Dual license?

[NevarMore]

In your example, the code derived from it has to be compatible with the GPL license OR the BSD license. Once code is licensed under one or the other its usually hard to go back, but one has to make a choice up front about it.

For example I can take some code I write and release it under GPL and my own for pay license. If someone pays for a copy they and I have to abide by my paid-license, if someone downloads it then they can do things with it as allowed by the GPL. This allows me to be flexible and support the needs of buisnesses (and pay my bills) while still supporting the community.

Re:Dual license?

[Anonymous Coward]

fork it. for example, a certain program is under GPL, its fork can't be made proprietary. the other fork of that program is under BSD, you can make its particular code proprietary, just because it's the same code now doesn't mean it will always be the same code. they'll go in different directions, one with the benefits to end-users that the GPL provides and the other's core code can still remain open while allowing companies to incorperate it into their software even if they don't open up their own code in this example.

Re:Dual license?

[4D6963]

So with dual licensing you can cover two different cases, right? But can you make it conditional, like, specify in your license statement that depending on certain conditions license A applies and else license B applies?

Re:Dual license?

[4D6963]

In this case, instead of forking, couldn't you just put certain parts of your code under the GPL license, and put the parts of the code you want to let companies use and close under the BSD license?

Re:Dual license?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I don't think the user switching licenses later is as big of a problem as you suggest though maybe you mean something else. I don't think a developer would want to make it hard to move from a GPL to commercial license, though maybe want to discourage moving from commercial to GPL. It might be tough if you end up mixing the code from other sources, that's the only thing I can think of, but that's quite problematic anyway. I think the original intent was to allow the developer sell support for the app rather than having to make an open and closed source license setup.

Re:Dual license?

[Morkano]

You can licence your code however you want, but if you make it conditional like that you could very easily make it incompatible with the licences they're based on, or open up loop holes, or make it not hold up in court or whatever.

The way they do it for MySQL and others is when you get it, only one licence applies. You choose which one you want to apply, but the choice of the commercial licence means you have to give them money. They're just giving you the ability to sell a product and keep the source closed if you're willing to pay for it.

Re:Dual license?

[Tim C]

Essentially, yes. The most common condition is that if you download it for free, licence A (typically the GPL) applies, while if you buy a licence from them then licence B applies (typically something that lets you keep the source to your product closed).

Re:Dual license?

[AVee]

As said above, you can perfectly do that (within the limits of the law), if it's your code, you get to set the terms. However, such a scenario is not dual-licensing, it's creting a wholly new license (which happens to be based on two other licenses). That very different from dual-licensing where the recieving party get to choose between the licenses. It also is likely very to create a license which is incompatible with both the licenses it is based on.

Re:Dual license?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does that work, I mean, for example if I license a program with both GPLv2 and BSD, do people who use my code have to make theirs GPL or not?

As others have commented, adopters simply choose the license they want. The interesting thing is what happens to your code at that point. In effect, dual-licensing creates two branches of your code -- you now have two programs out there living their lives (albeit with a shared codebase).

And it's likely that the GPL branch has a much more active life -- faster community development as well as wider user adoption -- while the BSDL branch probably has more (if there is any) commercial takers (which may result in surprise contributions back, as BSD guys from time to time mention as a real-life end-result of their licensing).

The problem for you would be, you can't put any GPL-branch fruit into the BSDL-branch, even if it's features you have planned for both (so you'd feel frustrated re-coding the same stuff and not peeking at the GPL code). But I'm not sure this is a realistic problem -- leading a code project is hard enough as it is (with just a single branch), you'd likely just abandon the BSDL-branch on its own. Unless it happened there was support money in it for you as the sole guru of said software (in this case by companies who have trouble digging GPL), in which case you might leave the GPL-branch development to the community, just providing management and cohesion to that project but not touching the code.

Re:Dual license?

[NevarMore]

You sir are a true slashdotter. Not only did you not RTFM the first time around, but you waited until there was a bakers dozen of responses to your question THEN read the article. You couldn't leave it at that either, you then had to reply to your own post stating that you read the article throwing hot grits in the faces of the people who also did not read the article but "knew" the answer to your question anyway.

Bravo, sir. Bravo.

Re:Dual license?

[4D6963]

If you look at the timestamps, my reply to my own question came earlier than any other reply to it. I'm amazed you didn't check that. But you're right on one thing, I'm a true slashdotter.

Re:Dual license?

[einhverfr]

Licenses are disunct. With one possible exception, you can choose which license to follow.

The possible exception may be the copyright notice which states which licenses you can choose to follow. For instance just because I use this dual-licensed code and distribute it, doesn't mean that it ceases to be dual-licensed if someone pulls out the Sun code out of my application.

Under the GPL and BSD scenario, I would think you could follow *either* the GPL *or* the BSDL, but would probably need to include references at least to both licenses. Assuming this is the GPL v2, the BSDL grants a superset of these rights by pretty much every interpretation so it basically becomes the governing license. With the GPL v3, this is less clear (in particular, I am not sure GPL v3, section 7, paragraph 2 can be excersized against BSDL code, so there may be uses for either license which are truly disjoint). IANAL though (at any rate noting that the code is dual-licensed. Anyway, it seems safer to continue to note that unaltered code is dual-licensed however.

Re:Dual license?

[NevarMore]

All in good fun. I forgot some sarcasm tags.

Re:Dual license?

[sumdumass]

The question then becomes, do you have enough usable code to have a program that works the way you want it to under both scenarios. The GPL restricts some things like linking of non GPLed code and so on with the derived programs clauses. The BSD license is probably the most liberal which would effectively allow propriatary code to mix well as well as your product to become propriatary.

The thing with a dual license is that any official contribution from outside the project means that they either have to sign the copyrights over or some how give you and your projects the ability to license in more then one way. Outside that, any outside contributions must be kept outside the project in order to satisfy the copyright holders rights and expectations under the licenses he distribute his portion of the code under. I could download your code under the GPL (whatever) make changes and redistribute it. But unless I gave you the ability to license under the BSD (or whatever "other license" your using" it would only complicate your project and basically create a separate fork for each license. SO what you would do is require me to either sign some rights over or fork the project and maintain my changes myself independently.

Only matters for Netbeans mods and add-ons, right?

[timeOday]

I don't think the Netbeans license ever made any claim on software developed within NetBeans, did it?

Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried it, but it still runs like ass. It's sad that a great platform like Java has such a bad rep because of one toolkit (Swing).

I'm developing an app in Java, using the JOGL opengl bindings and it performs fantastically. Netbeans, on the other hand, runs like I have it on a 486, not a quad core Q6600 Intel processor.

I don't know how people compare Netbeans to Eclipse, actually feels native (because it IS native) and runs snappy as hell. Not only that, but Eclipse is great for python, javascript, c/c++ and many, many other non-java technologies.

Re:Tried it

[DAldredge]

How long does it take to start on your Q6600?

Re:Tried it

[Lally Singh]

This was NS 6? Both it and Eclipse take a bit to start up (A 2GB Macbook Pro), but NB doesn't lag as badly as Eclipse when I use it.

I've been using Eclipse for some time, but it's been getting on my nerves with speed/crash-happiness/bugginess. NB's treating me better these days.

OTOH, maybe Eclipse is *really* focusing on the Win32 experience, and the Mac experience is just crappy?

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sad that a great platform like Java has such a bad rep because of one toolkit (Swing). ORLY? It isn't its closed nature, its incredible slowness in all real-world tests, its poorly designed libraries, its tacked on generics, its amazingly lame fake closure support (anonymous classes), its lack of useful type safety (there's more to type safety than objects), its complete lack of delegates, its overly strict file structure requirements,...

I don't know how people compare Netbeans to Eclipse, actually feels native (because it IS native) and runs snappy as hell. LoL, have you ever actually used Eclipse? I have (thanks, idiots who chose J2EE), and I have to tell you, I've never used a slower application. I'll Alt-Tab over from Outlook and then wait literally a minute for it to wake up and allow the native widgets to render. Thanks to the brain-dead "continuous compile" feature, it's the only application I've ever used that makes media players skip on a DUAL CORE machine.

Seriously, Eclipse is nigh unusable on a 2GHz dual core machine with 1GB of RAM. I suppose a quad core might make it "snappy" but on more "normal" hardware it runs worse than any program I've ever used. It's also one of the few Java programs I've used that manages to crash the virtual machine on a consistent basis.

Of course, since it's Java, it's always possible for Netbeans to be worse, so you could be right that Eclipse is "snappy" compared to Netbeans, but even WITH native widgets, Eclipse is one of the least responsive, slowest, crappiest IDEs I've ever had the misfortune of being forced to use.

Re:Tried it

[jma05]

> runs like I have it on a 486, not a quad core Q6600 Intel processor.

While Netbeans is not winning any performance awards, its performance is quite acceptable. I upgraded my processor only because I was unhappy with Netbeans performance. But mine should still be 3 times slower than a Q6600 and I think the performance is OK now. Perhaps there is something wrong with your VM memory settings or such?

> I don't know how people compare Netbeans to Eclipse, actually feels native (because it IS native) and runs snappy as hell.

The primary reason is that Netbeans has better out of the box support for Java standard frameworks. Swing and J2EE tools are still ahead of Eclipse offerings. If you can, use both. But if you are using a code only app such as your JOGL project, Netbeans does not offer a whole lot.

> Not only that, but Eclipse is great for python, javascript, c/c++ and many, many other non-java technologies.

Netbeans is catching up with all that and exposes a rich client framework just like Eclipse.

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has their own customized version of Sun's JRE, and it tends to visually perform better than the standard Sun JRE - at least, the swing components do. Microsoft had a pretty zippy JRE too, but they got sued and had to stop.

Oh well.

Re:Tried it

[try_anything]

I'm using Eclipse to develop an RCP app. The Eclipse platform provides a lot of functionality to build on, and aside from a slow start-up, it doesn't cause any sluggishness or instability in my app.

The Eclipse IDE, on the other hand, is infuriating. I have currently have workspaces named 2007-10-04, 2007-10-11, 2007-10-19, 2007-10-21, and 2007-10-25 because that's how often Eclipse irretrievably corrupts my workspaces. I've become so used to it that instead of deleting and replacing the corrupted workspace, I just create a new one and periodically delete all the corrupted ones.

Not to mention the constant out-of-memory and PermGen errors. I bumped up the startup values for memory and permgen, but I still have to restart Eclipse every couple of days.

Still, using the Eclipse IDE is an acceptable sacrifice to be able to program on the Eclipse platform and take advantage of its amenities. Next time I start a new project of this kind, I may try NetBeans (just to see if the grass is greener,) but I probably wouldn't consider writing a Java GUI app from scratch. I would write it on top of the Eclipse platform or something similar. It's worth it to get things like application update functionality for minimal work.

Re:Tried it

[siddesu]

around 25-30 seconds on a mobile pentium @ 1.5GHz (and 1GB RAM).
why?

Re:Tried it

[Call Me Black Cloud]

You tried NB 6? I run it on an average P4 with HT machine and it runs great. Our team is split 50/50 between NB and Eclipse and from what I've experienced NB not only runs better but is an easier app to use (my last project required we all use Eclipse so I'm very familiar with it).

Re:Tried it

[Lally Singh]

NB's ability to use your normal build system (ant or maven) as it's project file is what sold me. Oh, and I don't have to have this directory structure anymore:

eclipse
- 3.3
  - 1
  - 2
  - 3

Where each one is an installed copy of eclipse, and the lower numbered ones are copies that have fried themselves.

*And* a decent profiler built in :-)

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd try it out but I upgraded to Leopard and Java has been deprecated.

Re:Tried it

[greg1104]

OTOH, maybe Eclipse is *really* focusing on the Win32 experience, and the Mac experience is just crappy?

It runs fine on both Win32 and Linux, but yes the Mac experience is crappy. Apple likes to brag about their Java support, but the OS X support for the SWT features needed to fully support Eclipse is spotty. Check out how long the infamous SWT_AWT not implemented bug took for them to resolve. That was a showstopper for a variety of Eclipse plug-ins, and it was open from 6/15/2004 to 4/20/2006. Things are better now, but there's still a subset of SWT_AWT not implemented that breaks some tools, like parts of the fairly popular MyEclipse: see SWT_AWT.new_Shell() unimplemented for that dreary mess, which well over a year old now.

While these specific bugs are unlikely to be the sources of your crashes etc., every time I read up on the state of Eclipse+Mac OS X I find myself distrusting that combination; the base platform seems unstable, and as you can see from these two the bugs that are found can sit for years before being fixed. Recent moves from Apple like pulling Java 6 from Leopard aren't comforting either.

Re:Tried it

[AdamInParadise]

I've been using Eclipse for thousands of hours, all the way back to Eclipse 2.0. I've never seen Eclipse corrupt its workspace. However, I've seen lots of badly-written plugins that do manage to mangle their own configuration files.

Are you sure that your issues at coming from Eclipse?

Re:Tried it

[krelian]

I am really trying to like NB but the fact that on a windows box it take 8 seconds to open the file dialog makes me crazy.

Re:Tried it

[try_anything]

Yes, absolutely. I maintain a separate Eclipse install as my target platform and don't run any of my own plugins in the IDE. The only non-Eclipse plugin installed in my IDE is PyDev. I keep my projects outside the workspace; all the config files for the plugins I develop are kept in the project directories and versioned. Nothing is kept in the workspace except internal state maintained by Eclipse and its plugins. When Eclipse gets borked, I just create a new workspace and recreate all my projects, pointing them at the same project directories and same files as with the corrupted workspace. In other words, nothing I create or manage has to be fixed to get Eclipse working again.

Some developers who have a lot to lose from throwing away their workspace state have gone to a great deal of trouble to figure out which Eclipse workspace files to delete to solve certain problems; they'll look at the error log and go fishing around in the .metadata directory to try to fix things. Deleting the entire .metadata directory fixes almost anything, but that's tantamount to creating a new workspace.

Re:Tried it

[try_anything]

Also, though I'm not sure it's relevant, I should mention that to test my app, I always export it rather than launching it from Eclipse. I started doing this a month ago for unrelated reasons, and it hasn't improved Eclipse's stability.

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not a NetBeans Problem. It is a JDK 6.0 update 2 and update 3 problem. It takes JFileChooser forever to show up if you have zip files on your desktop or in the directory you are trying to navigate to.
JDK 6.0 update 1 and earlier versions don't have this problem.
here's the bug report for this:
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6578753

Re:Tried it

[blackpaw]

The NetBeans platform is available for NetBeans RCP apps as well. I haven't tried it personally but have heard good things about it.

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody else had a similar problem with Netbeans 6 and blogged about it: http://pinderkent.blogsavy.com/archives/132

They got a number of comments suggesting ways to improve Netbeans 6's speed. Maybe some of those would help you with the slowness you experienced?

Re:Tried it

[mcvos]

I use Eclipse every single day, and while I've had lots of problems with it (it freezes up for a couple of minutes every once in a while, the subclipse SVN plugin corrupts my projects (subversive is much, much better), EasyWebdav throws away files (but someone fixed the discontinued WebdavPilot to work with Eclipse 3.2)), I've never seen a workspace corrupted.

I have had that a workspace became unusable under eclipse 3.1 because I had way too many projects open (clean them up!), so I switched to 3.2 and created a new workspace, but now 3.2 can actually open my old workspace, which I thought had been corrupted. My advice: clean up your projects, and clean up your plugins. Use only the ones you actually use.

Just like with firefox, too many bad plugins will turn even the smoothest piece of software (which neither firefox nor eclipse are, mind you) to a steaming pile of shit.

Re:Tried it

[bauerbob]

Take a look into $NETBEANS_DIRECTORY/etc/netbeans.conf and raise the memory settings by factor 3 or 4. The default settings are much too conservative for your computer.

Re:Tried it

[CastrTroy]

But see, that's what happens when your IDE doesn't include any features, and actually requires plug-ins for some basic tasks. A few years ago, I tried to used Eclipse to do up a quick little Java app with a GUI. Apparently, at the time, you could either hand code your GUI or install some buggy plugin that did the job OK, but not quite that well. Or if you used Netbeans, then the drag-and-drop GUI designer was included as a core part of the IDE. IDEs as far as I'm concerned need a lot of functionality, because of their purpose. If their purpose was just typing code, then we could all just settle for notepad, but those who have used a good IDE know that they are so much more than that. So they should include a lot of features as core components that are well tested and well supported, because relying on third party plugins for things that should be core components leads to a very unstable program.

Re:Tried it

[Bert64]

Wow aren't Apple behind the curve, Microsoft deprecated Java back in 2001 with XP!

Re:Tried it

[Xiaran]

It's sad that a great platform like Java has such a bad rep because of one toolkit (Swing).

I could agree more with this statement. A co-worker of mine has a passionate hate for all things java... he recently changed his bittorrent client to azereus and was saying how please he was with it(thankyou swt). I mentioned it was a java app and he didnt believe me at first... it turns out he has a passionate hate for crappy (usually swing based) java applications... a very different thing. But this attitude affects the perception of the entire platform. His dislike used to spill over into my area(back end j2ee stuff... and while I have many things to say on some of the crappy decisions in that dept I wont for now) where he had no real expertise.

Re:Tried it

[flowsnake]

Although the Java 1.6 JRE apparently doesn't work too well with Leopard at the moment http://www.theregister.com/2007/10/29/no_java_for_leopard/ . Probably not a big problem in the long run, just a temporary compatibility issue, but if Apple insist on doing their own thing with the JRE then they really need to make it work. Java 1.6 has been around for a while now, I'd rather have the option of forgoing the visual improvements in order to get my hands on a released and supported version of something that works!

Re:Tried it

[MythMoth]

The primary reason is that Netbeans has better out of the box support for Java standard frameworks. How's its support for non standard frameworks though? Spring, for example, is now pretty much a requirement for most enterprise Java projects. Eclipse has a plugin created and owned by the Spring framework's developers, so while I don't really know the Netbeans situation I'd be surprised if it was as good.

Eclipse's standard framework support is pretty good, so even if it's not as good as Netbeans I'd be reluctant to switch.

Eclipse's only major problem that I experience is its dependency management feature for upgrading and installing new components. When it works, it's lovely, but mostly for me I seem to end up with missing library dependencies that it doesn't offer to install for me - making that particular feature useless! Hopefully I'm doing something stupid and someone will now explain to me why I'm such an eejot :-)

Re:Tried it

[pohl]

One interesting observation that I have made recently is that Netbeans seems to start much, much faster on Leopard than it does on Tiger. On the latter, the progress bar g ets 3/4 of the way through and pauses for a long while. On the former, it pauses just for a bit. I wonder if NB is doing some sort of multithreading of its initialization, and the concurrency is being handled on Leopard better. That's what it feels like, anyway.

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

I could agree more with this statement.

You seem to have strong opinions, but you don't always agree with them. ;-)

(Next time try "I couldn't agree more" as in "I couldn't care less". Unless you meant you could agree more with the statement "I could agree more with this statement" in which case you somewhat disagree that you somewhat disagree *explosion* NO CARRIER

Re:Tried it

[sequentially]

The timing of this article is ironic...I just tried Eclipse (and RH Dev Studio and JBoss IDE both Eclipse based) and NetBeans 5.5.1 this weekend. A few years back I considered myself a pretty good Java developer but then I switched to a new contract and had to learn MS .NET and C# (don't hold that agaisnt me please). This weekend I decided to dive back in to Java and thought that an IDE might be nice to try (previously I used VIM with CTAGS which was fast and all I needed at the time). At first, I tried Eclipse directly and must say that I wasn't so fond of its performance....if not slow then at least it is not fast, it has a billion menus and no intuitive way to find what you need (XDoclet sucks unless you are very familiar with it and all its options). Then on a whim I decided to try NetBeans 5.5.1. That tool is great (IMHO)! It is faster than Eclipse on my machine, has a layout that makes sense to me, and has a bunch of good getting started guides that really help you to learn the IDE (and for me to get me going with Java again since it's been a few years).

Re:Tried it

[elFarto the 2nd]

I started developing a little JOGL app in eclipse over the weekend, and found that it pauses for up to 30 seconds when displaying the code completion for the GL class.

Regards
elFarto

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you're using GCJ on Linux or a very slow computer.

The gl class is FREAKING HUGE however, as it has the entire OpenGL API in one class.

Re:Tried it

[try_anything]

The only non-Eclipse plugin I have installed is PyDev, and I only have eight or nine plugin projects in my workspace, all but four of which are binary plugin projects that wrap third-party libraries. The application I'm working on is fairly simple. Eclipse should be able to handle it easily.

The workspace-corrupting crashes seem to happen while I'm manipulating GUI components (opening submenus, expanding trees, etc.) whereas long resource-intensive operations like product exports produce the apparently harmless (but annoying) out-of-memory and PermGen errors. Based on that I would guess that corruption happens when a bug in native code crashes Eclipse while it's updating state. I'm using gtk2 x86 Linux; maybe the native code layer is more stable on your platform.

Re:Tried it

[dwarfking]

I know you don't feed the AC trolls, but I love comments like this. Let me guess, you've never worked in a big iron shop before have you?

COBOL is still around for a very simple reason: it does the job it was designed to do.

Which of your hip, cool languages would you propose to run on the big iron? You know, environments intended to process billions of transactions over petabytes of data in reasonable time windows? Some dynamic scripting language and a web server database?

The fact is nothing has come around that replaces the capabilities of COBOL for the job it is intended to do, which is business applications.

Just because you don't recognize its value, doesn't make it a joke. You may be inexperienced in using these languages, but plenty of others are building enterprise applications in many major large scale institutions.

Re:Tried it

[elchuppa]

check out intellij idea. Version 7 just came out. Costs money but there's a trial version. It's the most pleasant programming environment I know.

Re:Tried it

[LWATCDR]

I haven't tried 6 yet but 5 runs just fine on a 2.4 Ghz P4.
Start up time is allways a pain with java applications but with an IDE you tend to start it and run it all day.
If you are running slow on a quad core I have to wonder what else you are running at the same time?

Re:Tried it

[elFarto the 2nd]

I'm on Windows, on a P4 3.0Ghz machine and 1GB of RAM. Not the quickest, but certainly quick enough. It's the only class it does it on, and it's fine it a type 'gl.GL_' but pauses when I type 'gl.g' and when I press the 'l' after that.

However, I've checked this on my machine at work, and it works perfectly so I may have a bodged install (it was originally just the CDT version, which I upgraded to the Java version).

Regards
elFarto

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

http://spring-netbeans.sourceforge.net/. Works well IMHO.

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the parent poster.

I don't consider "start up time" a factor when dealing with a piece of software as complex as an IDE. I can deal with slow startup times. It's slowness while using the app that irks me.

Re:Tried it

[nostriluu]

I gotta agree, I use Java and Eclipse constantly and my experience is nothing like #21153657's ... In other words, I find Java/Eclipse performance to be fine, surprisingly snappy for many extremely complex operations (which require a strict language like Java), and by no means are operations like window redrawing slow. Seems like someone has a vendetta going on.

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

Eclipse isn't slow... if all you do is no more than Hello World.

Try to use Eclipse in a big project before talking.

Re:Tried it

[nostriluu]

I use it in a project with 20k lines of code and 30 third party libraries. It's fast, especially with the incremental compiler. The only time it is slow is when I need to rebuild the entire project, which only takes a few minutes, and is mainly due to the third party (myeclipse) validators, which have been speeding up release by release.

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

While these specific bugs are unlikely to be the sources of your crashes etc., every time I read up on the state of Eclipse+Mac OS X I find myself distrusting that combination; the base platform seems unstable, and as you can see from these two the bugs that are found can sit for years before being fixed. Recent moves from Apple like pulling Java 6 from Leopard aren't comforting either.

Yeah, as if one needed yet another reason to move away from Java.

Re:Tried it

[HiThere]

He's probably running the version of Eclipse that's compiled with gcj...i.e., native code.

Re:Tried it

[CryBaby]

Just have to add a "me too". The OP is doing something bizarre, using a crappy plugin or has a hardware problem. Eclipse simply does not crash and/or corrupt workspaces like that (at least for every Eclipse user except the OP). It wouldn't be very popular if it deleted your code on a regular basis...

Re:Tried it

[jma05]

> How's its support for non standard frameworks though?

Nowhere as good as Eclipse. But then Eclipse is exceptionally good in this respect. Netbeans position is not bad compared to IDEs other than Eclipse.

> Eclipse has a plugin created and owned by the Spring framework's developers, so while I don't really know the Netbeans situation I'd be surprised if it was as good.

There is a Spring plugin for Netbeans but it is not anywhere close to the feature set of the standard plugin.

> Eclipse's only major problem that I experience is its dependency management feature for upgrading and installing new components. When it works, it's lovely, but mostly for me I seem to end up with missing library dependencies that it doesn't offer to install for me - making that particular feature useless! Hopefully I'm doing something stupid and someone will now explain to me why I'm such an eejot :-)

You are not. That's the whole reason for having projects like EasyEclipse and commercial offerings such as MyEclipseIDE. Callisto and Europa distributions solved some problems but not all. Hopefully it will mature in this direction in the future.

Use whatever works for you. You can use them both in the same project if you partition your code with this goal. Besides, they are both free. But in your case, Netbeans may not have much to offer as it did for me.

Re:Tried it

[rishistar]

Some of us wouldn't settle for notepad. I Personally wouldn't settle for anything less than emacs.

Notepad is still preferable to vi though ;-)

Re:Tried it

[try_anything]

Nobody except me? Check out the Eclipse newsgroups; it does happen to plenty of people. Regardless, there are a couple hundred different plugins distributed in official Eclipse releases, and you sure as hell don't use them all, so how would you know Eclipse is stable for all users?

As for data loss, the corruption happens in Eclipse's stored state in the .metadata directory. I don't keep my projects in the workspace, but from what I've read, people who do can just import their projects from a corrupt workspace into a new workspace without any loss. So, no data loss is involved, but if you invest a lot of time in setting up your workspace (customizing lots of settings, arranging perspectives, etc.) it can be a pain in the ass. I use the basic Eclipse RCP install (Europa) with one third-party plugin (PyDev, which is rock-solid AFAIK) and only a handful of non-default preference settings, so it's just an annoyance for me.

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

More time than it takes you to ejaculate when you see a hairy ass.

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

as it's project file

"its".

Re:Tried it

[MythMoth]

Thanks for the precis; much appreciated.

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

Again, TRY using it in a big project (enterprise scale) before you talk..........

5 million line code base, 300 table database etc

Re:Tried it

[nostriluu]

One would assume you'd use partitioning in such a system, in which case the choice of language isn't as important as the architecture.

Go Competition

[hollywoodb]

I haven't really seen anything exciting from the Eclipse camp lately. Maybe I haven't been looking hard enough, but I hope that the continued development of a GPL alternative (NetBeans) keeps Eclipse from stagnating.

Personally I still use vim, but I haven't worked on a project large enough to cause me to want a full IDE like Eclipse or NetBeans yet.

Re:Go Competition

[pjr.cc]

I too still use vi/vim a fair bit. I LOVE *LOVE* vi syntax.

On a side note though, eclipse and NB both have vi plugins - havent used either of them myself though.

Re:Go Competition

[mackyrae]

I must find these plugins! Typing anything without vim keytricks is annoying now, but vim is a bit difficult to navigate with 1000-line files. I still don't understand Eclipse to use it instead of vim though, and I've never used Netbeans. IDEs just remind me too much of Visual Basic class for me to be really enthusiastic about them, and I like the simplicity of vim (the most complex IDE I like is BlueJ :p)

Re:Go Competition

[cerberusss]

vim is a bit difficult to navigate with 1000-line files

What exactly do you find difficult? Some tips:
1) You can set markers with 'm' and recall them with the backtick. For instance [esc]ma will set marker "a", then `a will jump back to that point
2) You can do [esc]:300 to jump to line 300

Re:Go Competition

[MemoryDragon]

Depends on where your main focus is, Netbeans 6 is really exciting full ruby/rails tooling within the ide, the visual webpack simply is fantastic for small webapps and the integrated jpa support also is not too shabby. I have been using MyEclipse for years, but Netbeans slowly with every release becomes more and more a strong competitor to the Eclipse area, also mainly due to the fact that if you want something decent in eclipse you have to pay, and even then you run into the myriads of bugs the WTP is. WTP has hurt Eclipse more than anything else, and if they cannot get their act together qualitywise, Eclipse one day will be dead in the JEE area. For now it still has the credits of the incremental compilation and excellent refactoring, but if you are forced to use the WTP run as fast as you can.

Re:Go Competition

[DerekJ212]

2) You can do [esc]:300 to jump to line 300
Actually, I believe [esc]:x will jump ahead x lines from the current, however still very useful.

Re:Go Competition

[cerberusss]

Nope, you must mean stuff like:
[esc]300j
goes down 300 times
[esc]20k
goes up 20 lines etc.

Re:Go Competition

[mackyrae]

It's not the moving so much as finding what you're looking for in context, but I didn't know about markers. I'll have to try that out.

Re:Go Competition

[cerberusss]

What's also useful is [esc]*

That searches for whatever is below the cursor.

If you're a programmer, check out exhuberant-ctags. Install it and in your source directory, run 'ctags -R'. Then in vi, you can jump to definitions with CTRL-] (go back with CTRL-T). You can also complete whatever you're typing with CTRL-N.

Re:Go Competition

[petermgreen]

the most complex IDE I like is BlueJ
IMO bluej is a one trick pony. It's object bench is a very nice feature but the rest of the IDE leaves a lot to be destired (or at least it did when I last used it, it may have improved since). Little things like only reporting one error per compile, deleting the whole line if you start to type immediately after getting a compile error (i presume it was using the mechanisms intended for selected text to show the line highlight) and the complete lack of any autocompletion features made it a pretty painfull environment to code in.

Re:Go Competition

[mackyrae]

I use vim, I like minimalism in my text-editors. I don't use auto-complete except in bash for finishing directory/file names. I don't use debuggers either (System.out.println() or printf() for C are all I need). The fact that you don't have to close the text-editing window to compile is what I liked. Vim, unfortunately, can't do that (yes, I know, EMACS can, but really....kitchen sink).

Re:Go Competition

[petermgreen]

The fact that you don't have to close the text-editing window to compile is what I liked.
You know you don't have to limit yourself to one terminal nowadays. you can have one xterm/vt/whatever running your editor and one to enter your compile commands.

For me the utility of a powerfull IDE depends what language I am coding in. IMO java is an overly verbose language and in my experiance a powerfull IDE goes a long way towards making that over verbosity bearable. For example in java the convention is that you make fields private and use getters and setters. Writing theese getters and setters by hand is rather tedious. In eclipse I can just declare the fields and then ask the IDE to add getters and setters for them.

It seems very odd to me that you would like autocompletion on the command line but not when editing code.

Re:Go Competition

[mackyrae]

I know you can have two terminals open :p I usually have a few tabs open so I can check what order parameters are supposed to be passed in my constructors and things like that. It's just a habit to :wq
 
A lot of variables, especially when GUIs are involved, end up having similar names, so knowing which it should complete as just complicates it, IMO. I have no problem with typing setters and getters myself. I did them Smalltalk-style ( thing() for getter and thing(param) for setter, using overloading) on my last assignment and had the TA slightly confused. Also made it a bit tougher to say the code out-loud when I used it as an example to teach my friend that objects are references on the stack to places on the heap and a bunch of other stuff that his professor hasn't gotten around to teaching them that seemed useful. It gave me a chance to explain overloading though :)

Re:Go Competition

[daem0n1x]

WTP has been a really buggy POS for some time. But I've been using the Europa release and it seems they got it right, at last.

Re:Go Competition

[some guy I know]

2) You can do [esc]:300 to jump to line 300

Fewer keystrokes: "<ESC>300G" (because "<RET>" isn't required afterwards).
(Also, you can omit the <ESC> in either case if you're already in command mode.)

Re:Go Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

It's object bench

"Its".

v2?

[larry bagina]

interesting. Sun's aware of GPL v3 and what it means (eg, they have discussed licensing open solaris as GPL v3 to prevent code from being used by linux). I'm guessing they don't want to give up their patents just yet. Don't forget they paid SCO.

Re:v2?

[eviltypeguy]

interesting. Sun's aware of GPL v3 and what it means (eg, they have discussed licensing open solaris as GPL v3 to prevent code from being used by linux). I'm guessing they don't want to give up their patents just yet. Don't forget they paid SCO.

Bzzzt. Wrong. The GPLv2 has an implicit patent license; the GPLv3 has an explicit; there is not really a large difference as far as licensing patents that go with the code is concerned. In Sun's case, it would be the same.

Also, they didn't "pay sco" in the way you are implying; they *licensed* technology from SCO that they needed to support their customers since they were *legally* bound to do so. Let's not twist the truth so far shall we?

Re:Only matters for Netbeans mods and add-ons, rig

[bazald]

Right, NetBeans, like GCC, never imposed any license restrictions on the code generated.

differences?

[bwy]

At this point, Eclipse is a mature, stable and feature-rich IDE with a healthy plugin community to boot.

For someone who has been using it for years (I switched from IDEA a while back), it would take a lot to cause me to switch at this point. Developers end up making a pretty big investment in fine tuning an IDE for complex development environments, and there are so many little details around every corner that take time to uncover and learn.

I should qualify this by saying that I'm perfectly able to swap if a new job required it. And if I were doing HelloWorld, single project type stuff it wouldn't matter in the slightest. But once you get a dozen or so interdependent projects in your workspace and you get everything running like a well oiled machine and don't go around thinking "I really wish this piece of junk could do X, Y and Z".... well, its a tough sell.

Re:differences?

[jeevesbond]

For someone who has been using it for years (I switched from IDEA a while back), it would take a lot to cause me to switch at this point. Developers end up making a pretty big investment in fine tuning an IDE for complex development environments, and there are so many little details around every corner that take time to uncover and learn.

It's probably not for you then! Having run both the big advantage of Netbeans is that it's smaller and faster than Eclipse. As someone just starting out with Java Netbeans was great because it didn't require much setup, did most of the user friendly stuff of Eclipse (code hinting), but lacked the bloat.

Certainly Eclipse provides more customisation opportunities, but not everyone needs that. Netbeans is a great 'starter' Java IDE. Personally my editor for everything textual is Vim, so that's what I'd end up with having learnt the language anyway.

Re:differences?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Developers end up making a pretty big investment in fine tuning an IDE

That is exactly why I gave-up on GUI IDE's completely like most programmers I know. My last attempt at using an IDE was with Eclipse. It was horrible on even a four CPU system w/ 4Gbytes of RAM (a huge amount for the time). I went back to where I started, using the UNIX IDE. Yes, UNIX is an IDE. UNIX got a lot of things right many years ago. Why fight the latest complete piece of crap IDE of the week when you can use a good one that has survived the test of time?

I still can't believe people are pushing Netbeans. I have to use it on a coworker's system every few weeks, and even with a very fast system I can still type faster than Netbeans can handle it. It's really sad when $3k in 2007 still won't handle keyboard input as fast as a $199 C64 in 1983. The thing is almost as slow as the VisualStudio garbage. With our (admittedly) accounting system written in .NET, it takes VS over 20 minutes to load. These new IDE's are a complete embarassment to computing.

Re:differences?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean that to type a lot of code per minute is a goal? In my company, we call this sh*tting code and we don't trust it.

Re:differences?

[Spikeles]

Personally my editor for everything textual is Vim

Then you would love this and this

Re:differences?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't say typing a lot of code was the goal.

It's just that a text editor should keep-up with professional programmers that can type >90 WPM. Between working with program managers on specs, meetings, code reviews, and other BS I only get about an hour a day to really program. I don't want to spend a good part of that hour waiting on a bloated GUI IDE to either load or to play catch-up with keyboard entry.

It's the same reason you see programmers use elm or pine for e-mail rather than Outlook.

Re:differences?

[MemoryDragon]

It depends on the toolchain, bare eclipse is best you can get for java editing second to none. (Well Intellij is also very good but that is a different league) but if you are forced to use the WTP, then Eclipse becomes a major pain. An example, a colleque of mine was using Eclipse he had to move up to Eclipse 3.3. I recommended Europa to him because he was using parts of the toolchain anyway, after Eclipse suddenly refused to given him code insight, he reverted back. Problems like this are myriad with the WTP and if I was forced to use it, I probably would have given up on Eclipse a long while ago. Fortunately there are bearable other options in the Eclipse world, if you want to shell out some money.

Re:differences?

[DerWulf]

That's bullshit. You know how I know? I created a new class in eclipse and mashed buttons on the keyboard as fast as I could. No Lag at all. P4 2.6GHZ, 2GB of Ram. Stop posing.

Re:differences?

[Anonymous Coward]

Performance is not just determined by CPU and RAM...

Re:differences?

[DerWulf]

This is relevant how?

GUI Builder

[rpp3po]

Netbeans is very stable and mature platform. There's nothing to bitch about. Eclipse on the other hand offers much more comfort concerning plain editing and refactoring tasks. Additionally it is part of a much more attractive ecosystem.

Still there is one thing where Netbeans beats every other Java IDE easily: The matisse GUI builder is really fun to work with! For Java there's nothing even close. And for that alone Netbeans has a very well founded raison d'être. If it's GPL now, lets wait and see how long it takes for Eclipse to absorb that great tool. There's already a commercial port for MyEclipse, but it's not free or usable on vanilla Eclipse, yet.

Re:GUI Builder

[postmortem]

Maybe they'll consume it, but that still doesn't mean that wise decision-makers in Eclipse Project are going to decide to include the new Visual Editor in basic download distribution. Instead, they might decide to bury it deep down on updates server as it is now with Visual Editor.

Re:GUI Builder

[Anonymous Coward]

But Eclipse isn't licensed under GPL. IBM already couldn't integrate Qt in Eclipse because of license issues.

Re:GUI Builder

[atehrani]

Not to mention UML (two way), Profiling, Visual Web development, complete JEE support. What comes "out of the box" with Netbeans is impressive. I also find Netbeans far more intuitive than Eclipse (I never liked their perspective concept). Startup can be a bit sluggish, but that's really not a deal breaker. People should honestly try it out; profiling is wonderful! Helps you find your bottlenecks and those pesky resource leaks. For FREE!

Re:GUI Builder

[MemoryDragon]

Netbeans irks me in some small areas, no incremental compilation, if you work on webprojects you have to go the entire compile/deploy cycle every time you do changes (which means a full war packaging cycle included) I would have loved more flexibility in this area.

Re:GUI Builder

[leomekenkamp]

NetBeans has a nice option which let you apply the chanches in your code without having to deploy a war file or restart the application or the whole of tomcat: Run | Apply Code Changes. It does not work for every class, but it can be a real time-saver. Since ant is used under the hood all of the build scripts still have to run, but usually the whole build system is smart enough to not recompile unchanged classes.

Re:GUI Builder

[fistfullast33l]

I used to love the Netbeans GUI builder - it basically did everything for me with no problems. However, once I took an acutal UI Design course where we wrote the code from scratch, I found it easier to design and write the code without hte builder than with it. The GUI builder doesn't really let you modify the structure of the code that much (which makes sense since it's automated) so you end up with this huuuuge initialization function and crazy callback setups that really don't scale well at all. It's nice if you're building a small front end, but for complex GUIs or for MVC it gets a bit hairy and hard to manage, especially with code control and multiple developers.

Just my opinion.

Re:GUI Builder

[Captain_Chaos]

And for that alone Netbeans has a very well founded raison d'être. If it's GPL now, lets wait and see how long it takes for Eclipse to absorb that great tool.

That might still be a while, since Eclipse isn't distributed under the GPL. It has its own license which is incompatible with the GPL, so they cannot incorporate GPL code. This has been a problem for a long time.

Re:GUI Builder

[rsk]

Actually the MyEclipse team snuck that ability into the 6.0.1 release. You can now install Matisse4MyEclipse directly into Eclipse without MyEclipse by just pointing at the MyEclipse discovery site and selecting M4M and not ME. (You do need a Pro subscription though to use it).

Instructions here:
http://www.myeclipseide.com/documentation/quickstarts/m4minstall/#install_eclipse

i quite like it...

[pjr.cc]

Well, i like netbeans 5.5.1 anyway. When i downloaded 6 (a little while ago, i think it was m2 or something?) i was most annoyed with the lack of ability to develop c/c++ apps (or at least, the extensions from 5.5.1 hadnt been moved across yet).

Having said that, i only use it for c/c++. I'd use it for php if it had a plugin worth using. I used to use eclipse for c/c++/php but these days i use gleany for php. I used to like eclipse, but eventually i just got annoyed with it and retired it.

Re:i quite like it...

[Anonymous Coward]

C/C++ support is built in - just download the full version.

Re:i quite like it...

[JonLatane]

Well, if you take ten seconds to look at the download page for NetBeans, you'll notice not only have C/C++ tools been moved, but they've got convenient packages for your needs.

Re:i quite like it...

[pjr.cc]

As i said, last time i looked which was sometime ago, it wasn't available. But i wasn't planning to try it again until 6.0 gets out of beta.

5.5.1 + c++ = working pretty well. So the desire to mess with it is quite limited unless i stumble on a bug which halts my ability to code.

My original point was more that 5.5.1 was quite good and 6.0 is likely to become as good which is why i moved from eclipse to it for c/c++ dev work.

Re:i quite like it...

[JSlope]

What is gleany?

it's the best Ruby IDE there is

[crayz]

The Netbeans 6 dev/beta releases have been quickly becoming the best Ruby/Rails IDE, bar none. Used to be Eclipse/RadRails for Windows/Linux, and Textmate for Mac. Netbeans has completely blown Eclipse out of the water for Ruby development as Aptana+RadRails has stagnated. Textmate isn't really an IDE to begin with, it's quite a unique and useful text editor. But the pace and quality of Netbeans Ruby support would be very tough to match, so even many hardcore Textmate Mac users have switched to Netbeans

Along with JRuby and Glassfish Rails, Netbeans is proving that Sun is dead serious about being the best Ruby game in town. They've got competitors in all three areas, but they are quickly becoming a major force in the Ruby community

Re:it's the best Ruby IDE there is

[krelian]

And the latest PDT and Pydev make Eclipse the best (free) IDE for PHP and Python development.

Re:it's the best Ruby IDE there is

[Anonymous Coward]

I just picked up Netbeans for the first time in about a year due to the Ruby support. I have to admit, it is quite nice. I'm not a java programmer, so anything that comes with java as a requirement sorta rubs me as wrong AND slow. It has a high hill to climb to get me excited. Ruby support in Netbeans 6+ does that.

Grab the Ruby specific Netbeans versions here: http://deadlock.netbeans.org/hudson/job/ruby/ OSX, Win32 and full versions available.

uh..

[Anonymous Coward]

or it could just be that Sun has seen that the community as a whole is skeptical of GPL3 and the license incompatibility mess that surrounds it and has said "well, we may as well release this gpl2'd for now; we can relicense it as gpl3 later if that's expedient"

To quote John Carmack

[boyter]

"When text editing is less then instant on a 3ghz machine you know something is very very wrong..."

Re:To quote John Carmack

[X0563511]

Ah, there's your problem. The trojan is logging the keylogger, which is logging the other trojan.

Fixed it for you, needed a third trojan to glue it all together.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[eviltypeguy]

If it was just text editing and not code hinting, folding, anti-aliasing, line counting, syntax checking, and a bunch of other things all at the same time -- I might agree with that. However, in this case, I think you're misusing John's quote.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean this guy: ..."when Carmack was 14, he broke into a school to steal Apple II computers, was arrested, and sent for psychiatric evaluation (the report mentions "no empathy for other human beings")...

Sounds like the comment is in character then.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack

Re:To quote John Carmack

[AHumbleOpinion]

If it was just text editing and not code hinting, folding, anti-aliasing, line counting, syntax checking, and a bunch of other things all at the same time -- I might agree with that. However, in this case, I think you're misusing John's quote.

Not necessarily. If your *text editor* is doing all that then something may be very very wrong, especially in your conceptual design. If it is running poorly on a 3 GHz system, then the very very wrong may be in your code implementation. The LISA assembler on the 8-bit 1 MHz Apple II of the early 1980s had a built-in text editor that was doing real time syntax checking and code generation as you typed, there are a lot of CPU cycles between individual keystrokes. IIRC when you told it to assemble it was mostly going back through the generated code filling in code/data offsets.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[zlogic]

Visual Studio 2005 does all that, and also really cool stuff borrowed from Office - like a (non-annoying!) smart tag that offers to do refactoring if you rename some variable or function. Or a feature that shows useful information on critical runtime errors - e.g. which pointer caused a segfault and a link to MSDN explaining what a segfault actually is. And I've never seen Visual Studio use more that 80 megs of RAM (even though some parts are managed code), while Eclipse's typical RAM usage on my PC is well above 250 megs.
And line-counting? A CPU-hungry task? I've seen Borland Pascal do that on a 486 with 8 megs of RAM and no harddrive (loaded everything from a Samba server).

Re:To quote John Carmack

[TheNetAvenger]

If it was just text editing and not code hinting, folding, anti-aliasing, line counting, syntax checking, and a bunch of other things all at the same time -- I might agree with that. However, in this case, I think you're misusing John's quote.

If the computer was a 80386, then I would agree with you. None of the things you mention is all that resource intensive. Think about it, your computer can render 3D worlds with 30fps on just the CPU, you think text editing should be this slow because of some highlighting and anti-aliasing?

Re:To quote John Carmack

[discord5]

you think text editing should be this slow because of some highlighting and anti-aliasing?

Yeah, but it's using a unified lighting and shadow model like doom 3. However because it was too dark to be eligable they had to up the contrast. Add to that some proper anti-aliassing, and you've got a real CPU/GPU hungry editor right there.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[LarsWestergren]

If the computer was a 80386, then I would agree with you. None of the things you mention is all that resource intensive.

The parsing is. I can (and do) edit C/C++, Java, Ruby, HTML/Javascript files in parallell. In all of these, Netbeans gives me syntax highlighting, warnings for deprecated code, errors for unmatched tags in HTML, usage suggestions and method/tag documentation in all of these languages whenever I press ctrl+space.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[DMUTPeregrine]

I'm pretty sure I can do all that in EMACS, and that isn't slow (anymore.) So if it is slow, there is a problem.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure I can do all that in EMACS, and that isn't slow (anymore.) So if it is slow, there is a problem.

Netbeans does a damn lot more than Emacs, so the comparison is silly.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you do WYSIWYG GUI building in Emacs?

I mean, are we still comparing Development environments with Text editors? (Granted emacs is aiming to become an operating system, a comparison of Netbeans with it just tells us that someone has not touched Netbeans ever!)

Re:To quote John Carmack

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually plain Emacs doesn't do syntax checking in real time. It needs Flymake mode to be able to do syntax checking and even that's not realtime but incurs usually a few seconds delay due using external tools to compile the source.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[Nurgled]

I won't disagree that those are useful features, but I wouldn't want to slow my editor down to get them. If I'm ever having to wait for my text editor to do something before I can continue typing then it has failed.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[thommym]

"Can you do WYSIWYG GUI building in Emacs?"
In Emacs (and vi/vim) you do WYGIWYG.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[squiggleslash]

I hate to point this out, but I'm stuck running Netbeans 5 on a somewhat ancient 350MHz G3 at work, with less than an ideal amount of RAM (384Mb), and Netbeans is only slow if it needs to be swapped back into memory after switching to Firefox.

I rather like it, it's faster than Xcode (but that's not difficult.)

I'm not sure why the apologists are all talking about how much more Netbeans does than vi, it really isn't necessary, the claim that text editing is less (than) instant on a 3GHz machine is false, unless you're talking about a 3GHz machine that has 64k of RAM or something.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[Anonymous Coward]

289MB resident on start makes baby jeebus cry.

(AMD64, Netbeans 6.0 beta 2, jre1.6.0_something, 64 bit default JRE)

Cool thing is, besides a bit of page cache, almost none of that is shared with a second instance of the same app! Woohoo Go Java. Starting a full 64 bit OpenSuse 10.3 desktop takes about 200MB...

Re:To quote John Carmack

[Anonymous Coward]

If you haven't ever seen Visual Studio 2005 use more than 80MB of RAM then I would say you haven't done any mobile or web application project work with it. When you start a web project memory usage will jump considerably, and your IDE will freeze waiting on the web support to load. I don't know how Eclipse does it, but NB loads all that stuff up front, and until you actually use any of the web or mobile stuff those modules won't actually use much memory. NB is using around 80 or 90 megs after startup on my system and that is with all modules and support installed (includes Ruby support).

Re:To quote John Carmack

[renoX]

But those thing are *additional* functionalities, they shouldn't slow down the most important one..

Re:To quote John Carmack

[drew]

It's still just a text editor...

Re:To quote John Carmack

[TheNetAvenger]

The parsing is. I can (and do) edit C/C++, Java, Ruby, HTML/Javascript files in parallell. In all of these, Netbeans gives me syntax highlighting, warnings for deprecated code, errors for unmatched tags in HTML, usage suggestions and method/tag documentation in all of these languages whenever I press ctrl+space.


I can't believe this is actually being defended. Do you not understand the laughable aspect of this on today's processors?

There is a community of people here that have used 'more advanced' IDE environments on lower end hardware 10 years ago. Ask Delphi, VB, VS developers how well these features have worked, and they are dealing not only with the language syntax, but also massive multi-level OS API sets.

Delphi 2007 handles not only the language, vcl, .net, and also a 400mb OS SDK of APIs, and it loads in a couple of seconds, and works instantly.

How on earth can you continue to defend 'text' editing performance?

There is NO reason this should be slow as crap, and it is borderline crap.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[bladesjester]

a (non-annoying!) smart tag that offers to do refactoring if you rename some variable or function.

I have come to love that feature. The first time I saw it, I was amazed and happy.

You want to auto refactor my code based on a change I made? Why yes please.

I also have to agree that Eclipse is a bit resource hungry (I actually liked it and used it for a few years). One of the other things that got me is how long it takes their version of intellisense to actually pop up while I was working (by the time it appeared, I had already finished typing). On the same machine, VS2005 does it basically instantly.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[mattgreen]

Don't worry, the next version of Java will fix all that, you'll only have to wait another year for it to be released, and it will probably not be compatible with anything that's out there. Actually, it probably won't fix what you're talking about, but everyone will say it will and hand-wave your argument away because RAM is cheap.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[LarsWestergren]

I can't believe this is actually being defended.[...]How on earth can you continue to defend 'text' editing performance?

Believe what you want. I have used VB/VS, and they were nowhere near what Netbeans offer. Delphi I don't know, but is the IDE capable of all this? Running on multiple OSes? I doubt it.

The load times I give you, they are pretty atrocious, but Netbeans6 is beta, and I believe Sun is working on reducing JVM load times, and Netbeans especially.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[TheNetAvenger]

The load times I give you, they are pretty atrocious, but Netbeans6 is beta, and I believe Sun is working on reducing JVM load times, and Netbeans especially.


Sun and their promise that Java will get faster has been the motto of the year for 12 years now, when will it actually get faster than turtle speeds?

Sad that running a Java written IDE on Mono is faster than Sun's own crap.

Re:To quote John Carmack

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry buddy, but having done a load of Delphi work on enterprise apps over the years, there is no way that 10 years ago Delphi had quick code completion. As soon as you get a decent enterprise size object structure (as in ORM layer objects), it ran like an absolute DOG! Compile times of up to 5 minutes on a Pentium 2, and code completion boxes taking over a minute to appear.

It may be good now, but you need to take your rose coloured glasses off, because for a long time it was absolutely pathetic - or maybe you've never worked on a decent sized project?

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

So what's wrong with the CDDL? It's OSI-Approved, based on the Mozilla Public License.

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[postmortem]

..so is every other company playing with GPL...after all every company runs primarily for profit, not for benefit of mankind unless a) it brings profit b) it is benign side effect

In Iran

[kavehmz]

I love netbean but sun's policy about software export and limiting downloads in countries like Iran is so frustrating. :( As a absolutely non-terrorist ;), free software developer, I hope I can have free access to download it sometime. :P

Re:In Iran

[Macrat]

Sun's policy?

Sun is a US company and by US law, Sun is not allowed to export to restricted countries.

Re:In Iran

[kavehmz]

Not all companies are doing so, but you are right,

Re:In Iran

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps you could 'just' get the sourcecode printed in a book, export that and scan it like they did with PGP.

From http://www.netbeans.org/about/legal/terms-of-use.html

e. Export Compliance. Materials and Submissions may be subject to U.S. export controls or the trade laws of other countries. You agree to comply with all such laws and to obtain such licenses as may be required. Materials and Submissions containing encryption software, technology and/or technical assistance involving encryption (collectively "Encryption Technology") may be subject to U.S. Export restrictions. You agree not to submit any Encryption Technology to this Site. You warrant that you are not identified on the most current U.S. export exclusion lists or located in or a national of countries that are prohibited from participating in this Site by reason of U.S. embargo or other trade prohibitions as specified in the U.S. export laws, including but not limited to the Commerce Department's Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control regulations. You agree not to use Materials and Submissions for nuclear, missile, chemical, or biological weaponry end uses.

Re:In Iran

[nadavwr]

Only so long as you don't use it to operate nuclear plants :)

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[nuzak]

Yeah I know it just sucks that Sun gives away millions of man-hours under the GPL but not every single last line of code they ever wrote. I mean who the hell do they think you are by not dedicating every resource they have to the service of free software instead of themselves?

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[bladesjester]

As nice as Sun makes it sound, they really aren't fully committed to the GPL. They only seem to use the GPL when it suits them

A company using a license only when it makes sense to do so? How terrible!

If Sun was truly committed to free software, they would use the GPL on everything because in a true free software space it doesn't matter if your customers mix-and-match the pieces

Let's get real here, folks. Making some of your software available as open source does not mean that you should have to make *everything* you create open source. I certainly don't. Some things are open source (all of the ones on my site at the moment are GPLv2 because I loathe the moral crusade the fanatic otherwise known as RMS is trying to get the world to join in with v3); some things are commercial.

I get so sick and tired of the GPL fanboys who think that everything else is evil. The people who own the code get to decide what they want to do with it, not you. Deal with it.

If they want to give it away, be happy that you got something new to use or play with. If they want to sell it, either buy it or don't, but for the love of everything decent, stop bitching about the fact that not everything is released under your favorite license.

I've known a lot of developers that have stopped writing open source software because they got sick and tired of dealing with the fact that no matter what they released, people bitched at them because it wasn't "free enough" or because not *ALL* of their software was open source.

The whole of the world doesn't want to be Stallman followers and, to be honest, I view that as a very very good thing because the man is off his rocker.

Netbeans...

[ForumTroll]

Lean, well-featured, and fast.

Netbeans isn't even remotely close to being lean or fast. I downloaded Netbeans 6 Beta 2 a few days ago, and it's still one of the slowest applications I've ever used. Additionally, Swing still looks terrible, doesn't fit in with the desktop, and has horrible font rendering.

Re:Netbeans...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an option somewhere to enable anti-aliased fonts in Swing (for your programs). That will take care of your font problems.

Regarding how Swing looks, it is a fault of Java (or Sun should I say) than Netbeans.

Re:Netbeans...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Regarding how Swing looks, it is a fault of Java (or Sun should I say) than Netbeans."

Because of course it's not the fault of netbeans to choose such a stupid and gay GUI toolkit.

Re:Netbeans...

[Anonymous Coward]

Go read: http://lemnik.wordpress.com/2007/05/22/native-looking-netbeans-on-linux/

Re:Netbeans...

[gregmac]

I haven't tried 6 yet, but 5.5.1 is certainly one of the slowest programs I've used in recent memory. It often takes a few seconds to switch between documents. If I'm using the code helper popups, I'm constantly waiting several seconds for them to load. Possibly the slowest part is the red underline for syntax errors - you forget a bracket or something, then a few lines later it highlights it, so you go back and fix it. It remains highlighted for another 30 seconds, then finally turns off.

On the same machine, Visual Studio is blazingly fast, and it has all the same interface features. I realize it's not written in Java, but all the Java guys ever say about Java's speed is "it runs just as fast as native code; here watch this algorithm that runs the same speed".

Re:Netbeans...

[Captain_Chaos]

Netbeans isn't even remotely close to being lean or fast. I downloaded Netbeans 6 Beta 2 a few days ago, and it's still one of the slowest applications I've ever used. Additionally, Swing still looks terrible, doesn't fit in with the desktop, and has horrible font rendering.

I guess your handle adequately explains this wilful dissemination of blatant FUD. You know very well that betas are not optimized for performance and comparing a beta version of one product to a production release of another product is unfair and misleading. And it isn't even true that the Netbeans 6.0 Beta 2 is slow. On my system it starts in seven seconds, just as long as Eclipse 3.3.

As to your other points: please define "fit in" and "horrible". On my Windows XP desktop I cannot distinguish Netbeans from any other Windows application, including the nicely anti-aliased fonts. It only looks different than Firefox and the various MS Office products, none of which "fit in" with the Windows XP desktop themselves.

Re:Netbeans...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's very fast, I tried it on slower hardware too. First time startup time is not an indication of performance btw.
It looks great now and the font rendering is the same as XPs, it's very good. Maybe you should try it again with Java 6.

Re:Netbeans...

[ForumTroll]

I didn't even mention Eclipse, so I'm not sure what unfair and misleading comparison you're talking about. Now that you mention it, I don't think Eclipse is all that fast either. I mentioned the Netbeans beta because one of its primary goals has been to improve performance. My criticisms would have been just as valid had I said Netbeans 5.5 or any other production release of Netbeans. It has never been an application that I'd call lean or fast. Performance has been a major complaint of Netbeans users for a very long time. If you're one of the few people who think Netbeans is lean and fast, good for you. I, and many others, happen to disagree.

As for the rest of your comment, maybe you should try Netbeans and Swing on Linux or *BSD before you blatantly accuse me of spreading FUD. The GTK look and feel was horribly broken up until Java 1.6 and it's only slightly better now. Most Swing applications, including Netbeans, don't even attempt to enable the GTK look and feel by default on Linux because it's still quite broken. Since Netbeans doesn't even attempt to look like a native Linux application, and instead just uses the Metal\Ocean look and feel, it looks terribly out of place. Swing also completely ignores the system font settings and uses fonts that look like garbage. Even after setting the swing.aatext property to true, the fonts aren't nearly as good as the fonts used by native Linux applications. I've heard it's much better on Windows, but since I don't use Windows, that doesn't really matter to me.

Careful there. . .

[ookabooka]

If you've been using Eclipse, Netbeans 6 is really worth a look.

Also, if you've been using emacs, vim is worth a look. Vim is lean, well-featured, and fast.

Re:Careful there. . .

[LordHatrus]

And, if you've been using vim, ed is worth a look. Ed is lean, fast, and is the standard text editor. :-)

Re:Careful there. . .

[andi75]

Alas, they removed that from the manpage.

Now:

ED(1)

NAME
              ed, red - text editor

SYNOPSIS
              ed [-] [-Gs] [-p string] [file]

              red [-] [-Gs] [-p string] [file]

DESCRIPTION
              ed is a line-oriented text editor....

It used to be:

ED(1)

          ed - text editor

SYNOPSIS
          ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
          Ed is the standard text editor.

Also worthy note is:

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929 /bin/ed
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970 /usr/ucb/vi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990 /usr/bin/emacs

Re:Only matters for Netbeans mods and add-ons, rig

[Architect_sasyr]

What program does? I'd not be surprised to find some of the .NET code generators did... I've just never heard of a program in use which does... honest question, not an attempt at humour.

Re:Only matters for Netbeans mods and add-ons, rig

[_merlin]

Visual Basic (pre .NET) and RealBasic place restrictions on the generated code, because the distribution terms have to be compatible with the distribution terms on the runtime engine that the executables will require.

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[Vexorian]

Lately even MS' anti GPL and pro software patents poison is OSI approved, though...

They wouldn't even for a single license

[Anonymous Coward]

The GPL is not "viral". You can use it with non-GPLed code (and it doesn't change the
license on that code) as long as that code doesn't have any restrictions which aren't
in the GPL. The "viral"ness of the GPL is that you can't redistribute it under any other
terms -- including if you make derivative works and distribute those.

The FSF also takes an expansive view toward derivative works of their own software, so
that a program linked with their code, but not otherwise including it, would create a new
work covered by the GPL. The non-GPLed component would still be non-GPL if distributed
by itself. This is why some of their software, like glibc, is under the LGPL.

Re:They wouldn't even for a single license

[Anonymous Coward]

The "viral"ness of the GPL is that you can't redistribute it under any other
terms -- including if you make derivative works and distribute those. That's almost missing the point - the "viral"ness is that you have the distribute *the entire* derived work under the GPL regardless of which parts came from the GPL code or not.

the difference in my mind.

[pjr.cc]

The biggest difference in my mind between eclipse and NB is really external developement.

When you look at the wide variety of extra functionality that exists (through plugins or whatever) for eclipse v's NB the difference is huge. Not only do 3rd parties take eclipse and build an IDE out of it (palm did that, but theres ALOT more than just palm), but the thousands of plugins available for eclipse are impressive. Hopefully the GPL license will mean NB starts getting more plugin dev from third parties because its a nice IDE IMHO.

On performance though - both are relatively chunky editors, but i do find NB faster than eclipse.
I can feel the "lag" in both too though, if i open something in gleany/gphpeditor/vim i notice the difference between it and either NB/eclipse for typing lag. Its only milliseconds, but its still noticable.

Having said all that, the plugins used with either can vastly affect performance! the original php plugin for eclipse (or really it was an entire download of eclipse with php functionality added in originally and probably still is) it was dog slow compared to the eclipse i used for c/c++ dev work.

Re:the difference in my mind.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its only milliseconds, but its still noticable. Sorry, you are a brilliant computer, but you just failed the Turing Test. Please keep practicing and post again, you'll eventually get it!

My initial response

[Max Littlemore]

Lean, well-featured, and fast."

Hahahahahahahahahaahaha!.

Lean, wel-Hahahahahahahahahaha!

Wait - wait - fas-Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Thanks kdawson, you made my day. Should have given it that foot icon though....

Re:Only matters for Netbeans mods and add-ons, rig

[AuMatar]

At one time, Visual Studio licenses said you couldn't use them to write a competing compiler. No idea if that has been removed or not.

wasting office hours

[tventiethfret]

I've never used a java IDE. I know nothing about software licences. I dont know why i just went through all the comments on this page. :(

Re:wasting office hours

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never used a java IDE. I know nothing about software licences. I dont know why i just went through all the comments on this page. :(

Not to mention why the hell you bothered to post about it. You are truly an enigma, tventiethfret.

Re:wasting office hours

[Dareth]

Thanks for the effort. Unfortunately, your comment was an improvement in the thread!
Positively insightful.

Netbeans vs. Eclipse...again

[epistemiclife]

I think that this argument is pointless. I've used both Eclipse and Netbeans extensively for Java and C++. Now I use Netbeans, because I think that it's more pleasant to use, and it has features which appeal to me personally. However, some people like Eclipse, and that's fine. Eclipse's high customizability (lack of structure) annoys me. Some complain that Netbeans is "slow," but it really isn't. Yes, it takes about .1 seconds for the context-sensitive code-completion to pop up, but I frankly don't know any people who code faster than their IDE. If that is the case, then the code isn't very complex and such people probably don't need any IDE at all. Neither Netbeans nor Eclipse can reasonably be considered "lean," but neither are they the clunkers that some would have people believe. Those people probably haven't used it in 6 years. Both computers and Java have gotten faster since then.

Re:Netbeans vs. Eclipse...again

[iswm]

I find lag in code completion popups unbearable. I used to use eclipse for primarily Java and ActionScript development, but have since been slowly weening myself off eclipse and moving towards jedit. Before eclipse 3.3, eclipse's code completion popup was SLOW, and I wanted to kill myself everytime it popped up because it threw me off. I'd type "System.out.print," for example, but by the time I got to the "o" in "out" eclipse would just hang, and I'd keep typing, then the box would pop up, then the rest of my text that I typed while eclipse was hanging would fly onto the screen, and then it'd do the same thing for "print" and the whole process of typing out a simple line took 4 or 5 times longer than it should have. Speed is a lot better in 3.3, but that stupid completion box popping up still annoys me sometimes, especially when I'm just trying to call a method with a short name like "add" or "pop," where the slight lag of the popup coupled with having to select an entry from the list makes it take longer than it normally would to simply type "add," and it MAYBE only saves me one keystroke. Of course I could keep typing and ignore the popup, but there's still that .1 second lag, and it's pretty damn annoying. Completion is nice when it saves me from having to type "someReallyLongStupidlyNamedMethod" over and over, but sometimes completion is just more trouble than it's worth.

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[someone1234]

There is nothing wrong with GPL fans, but trolls like the grandparent.
Any primary developers are free to pick any license, if there are whiners, they can shut up.
I'm also sick with people who don't like the GPL, there is nothing wrong with it. If you don't like it, don't use code licensed under it. This applies v3, i bet most of the software on YOUR site is GPLv2 OR later.

NetBeans in NetTomatoSauce

[ThirdPrize]

on NetToast. My favourite.

Why Netbeans vs Eclipse?

[el_chupanegre]

I don't seem to get why anyone needs to pick one or the other.

Personally, for the last 3 years I've been using Eclipse 3.x and Netbeans 5.x. I can see the benefits of each, and each annoys me in it's own seperate ways.

For example, in Eclipse, why can't I add an external folder to the classpath without stupid variables? Why only a jar? In Netbeans there isn't a distinction.

To me though, Netbeans just feels alot clunkier. Once I have everything set up in Eclipse, I'm definitely more productive, with one caveat. The GUI builder in Netbeans is fantastic, it really is. Nothing free that the Eclipse world offers even comes close to competing with it. I usually do most code in Eclipse, make the GUI in Netbeans and import that into Eclipse.

So I say, why pick one over the other? You need more than one tool to build a house, why not use as many as you like to build your software?

Re:Why Netbeans vs Eclipse?

[peter_gzowski]

For example, in Eclipse, why can't I add an external folder to the classpath without stupid variables? Why only a jar? In Netbeans there isn't a distinction. This may not be any less annoying, but you can "Add Class Folder" to the classpath, "Create New Folder", "Advanced >>", "Link to folder in the file system" and point it at your external source. If you just need to add it to a runtime classpath, you can do that under the "Classpath" tab in the "Open run dialog..." window, go to "User Entries", "Advanced...", "Add External Folder". It would be nice if the runtime classpath functionality was also the build classpath functionality.

Re:Why Netbeans vs Eclipse?

[Alpha77]

How does all of this compare to IntelliJ IDEA? It's been a long time sine I've looked at NetBeans, and from time to time I try to use Eclipse, but compared to IntelliJ Eclipse feels clunky, slow and overly complicated. The basic idea is very nice, but the problem with flexibility is that you can have too much of it. IntelliJ hits the sweet spot between power and ease of use, IMHO.

However, I would like to be able to use a free (as in beer) IDE for my casual Java coding at home.

Re:Why Netbeans vs Eclipse?

[NewIntellectual]

I usually do most code in Eclipse, make the GUI in Netbeans and import that into Eclipse.

Can you go into a little more detail on how you do that?

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[VGPowerlord]

i bet most of the software on YOUR site is GPLv2 OR later.

That really depends on what kind of site you're talking about. For some reason, I thought web site rather than workplace; if you actually meant workplace, the following probably doesn't apply.

I can build a web server that doesn't use any GPL software just by using *BSD, Apache or Lighttpd, Perl or PHP or Python, and PostgreSQL. All of these are open source; none of these are GPLed.

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[VGPowerlord]

-1 Troll???
At what point advocating for free software *on slashdot* became taboo?

He had two moderations, one Troll and one Flamebait.

It's not surprising that a post filled with rhetoric and hyperbole gets those two mods.

At the same time, "el lobo" gets moderated +5 for clearly offtopic and offensive post.

He got moderated Informative for giving information about Windows Licensing in a topic about Windows Licensing. I can't see how anyone but a GNU zealot would find that offensive.

Speaking of Flamebait and Troll mods, don't be surprised if you get some too for the same reasons listed above.

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[Tim C]

In what way is el lobo's post off topic? To be honest offensive is really stretching it too, but a post about educational licensing of MS products attached to a story about educational licensing of MS products is off topic?

know I haven't got mod points for like a year

I haven't had mod points for about 5 years, but you don't hear me whining about it.

and haven't got meta-moderation opportunity for the last four months

What happens when you go to http://slashdot.org/metamod.pl? For a couple of years I got a "permission denied" message, although that changed a couple of years ago.

in spite of constantly positive karma

My karma's been maxed since back when you got a numeric score instead of the silly textual description.

Advocating free software isn't taboo here; what gets a lot of us annoyed is people spouting crap. Sun isn't fully-committed to the GPL? So what? They've never said that they are. You want to advocate free software? Fine - do it by politely explaining the benefits. Don't do it by tearing any company a new one just because they don't fall over themselves to immediately offer up all of their code under your favourite licence. That just helps create the perception that the free software community are a bunch of immature, grasping whiners, which is not the sort of thing most companies are going to want to be associated with.

citation required {{fact}}

[Burb]

I'd like to see proof of that one way or the other. There was a lot of discussion in the early days of Mono and Portable.NET about whether it would be problematic to write a C# compiler in C# because it would need the MS compiler to bootstrap. Furthermore, you'd need to distinuish between Microsoft's compiler and runtime (free as in beer) and Visual Studio (mine's a pint). Without being rude to the original post, this seems like it originated in FUD. I have no vested interest, I'm just asking.

Re:citation required {{fact}}

[statusbar]

I can vouch for that. It was a long time ago, I think around Visual C++ studio V4 or V5, most definitely before V6- The EULA said that you could not use the tools to create programs that competed against their Microsoft Office suite.

--jeffk++

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[someone1234]

I meant that 99.9% of his gplv2 is in fact gplv2 or higher.
Nothing more nothing less.

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't the the president and top engineers open source their young wives and older daughters too. It's just unfair to open source part of the company. They should require all the young females and (for the ladies) males in the company. That's when I believe they believe in open source. But, wait, that's not even GPL. They need to open source them under GPL, where anyone can have total access to the open source "materials", and pass on as pleased.

Wow, no GPLv3?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, huge loss for the Stallmanistas. Looks like Netbeans took a pass on the business-hostile GPLv3. I wonder why?

Re:Only matters for Netbeans mods and add-ons, rig

[petermgreen]

Afaict most compilers don't put restrictions on the code they generate but most compilers generate code that relies on a runtime library and there are usually conditions attatched to the redistribution of that runtime library.

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[sacrilicious]

I get so sick and tired of the GPL fanboys who think that everything else is evil. The people who own the code get to decide what they want to do with it, not you. Deal with it.

It's overly simplistic to criticize proponents of the GPL as being against code owners exercising their rights. If I'm a tomato farmer in Peru, you can certainly champion my right to keep my tomatoes all to myself; I grew them, so that's my right. But it misses the larger point that if I trade or sell some percentage of my tomatoes in a market system, in return I can get clothing and medicine. My rights shouldn't blind me to the benefits of participating in a wider ecosystem... which is precisely what the GPL facilitates.

Net beans described as "lean"...??!?

[Richard Steiner]

No. Not really. TurboPascal for DOS might've been lean, and Java IDEa like BlueJ are lean, but Netbeans is large and slow if you run it on older hardware. It'll still work, but not quickly.

I think some folks are forgetting that not everyone is doing development on 3GHz desktops... :-)

Re:Net beans described as "lean"...??!?

[teknopurge]

You know BlueJ is Netbeans, right?

If you think NB is slow, turn off some modules you don't need.

Re:Net beans described as "lean"...??!?

[Richard Steiner]

You know BlueJ is Netbeans, right?

Uh... No, it isn't...

Now, there *is* a variant of Netbeans called the "BlueJ Edition", but that is not the same thing as vanilla BlueJ.

At all. Believe me.

If you think NB is slow, turn off some modules you don't need.

I do better than that. I don't use it at all. :-)

new Netbeans 6 beta 2 has great Ruby support

[MarkWatson]

I used to do most of my Ruby and Ruby on Rails coding using TextMate but I have switched to using NetBeans. Beta 2 understands Ruby code well enough for (mostly) meaningful code completions and having popup documentation for the standard classes is useful. The integration of the "fast debugger" is also handy. Rails support is also very good. I usually use native (Matz C) Ruby, but NetBeans supports JRuby also. BTW, I used to use Common Lisp, Ruby, and Java about equally in my work, but recently I have been living with the Ruby performance hit and I am starting to use Ruby for just about everything that I do.

Re:new Netbeans 6 beta 2 has great Ruby support

[MarkWatson]

One other thing: I like to keep a copy of NetBeans 6 beta 2 with only Ruby/Rails support added: I am not sure if it helps startup time, but it is a small price to pay, disk storage wise.

Don't blame Apple for SWT

[metamatic]

Don't blame Apple for patchy SWT support. SWT isn't part of Java, and Apple never claimed to support it. It's up to IBM and the Eclipse project to get SWT working on OS X.

[Opinions mine, not IBM's.]

Re:Don't blame Apple for SWT

[greg1104]

SWT isn't part of Java, and Apple never claimed to support it.

Wrong. Apple has been promoting Eclipse compatibility in OS X since mid-2004, while failing to deliver a fully working product.

It's up to IBM and the Eclipse project to get SWT working on OS X.

If you look through the bug reports I linked to, you'll discover the issues were caused by things like the decisions Apple about the threading model when implementing SWT. It wasn't possible for IBM and the Eclipse project to work around such fundamental problems without getting corrections from Apple.

Re:Don't blame Apple for SWT

[metamatic]

Wrong. ADT articles about something do not mean that it's officially supported, or part of OS X.

For example, there are articles about MySQL on OS X and Subversion on OS X, and neither of them are shipped with OS X, not is there any special OS support for them.

Nor is the fact that Apple may have helped with SWT development any indication that SWT is part of Java, or part of OS X, or supported by Apple.

Re:Don't blame Apple for SWT

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong.

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[bladesjester]

i bet most of the software on YOUR site is GPLv2 OR later.

Nope. The software I release under the GPL is released under version 2, not version 2 or later.

Thank you for playing. Please try again.

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[bladesjester]

There's a big difference between proponents and fanboys.

For example - I am a proponent of open source, but I am not a fanboy.

Proponents see that sometimes a tool is right for the job and that sometimes it isn't.

Fanboys think that anything that isn't their license is wrong and that everything should be freeeeeeeeeeee no matter what the people who made it want.

GPL v2 and v3 are identical in intent

[Anonymous Coward]

If you "loathe Stallman's crusade", better steer clear of GPL v2 as well. GPL v3 is identical in spirit to the previous version - it is just an attempt to close some loopholes and clarify ambiguous areas.

I think RMS is almost always correct, but unfortunately prone to inflammatory, over-the-top rhetoric concerning non-free software. His speeches often make me wince, because his harsh polemics cause people to write him off as a nut, and likewise cause people to reject his solid, clearly reasoned arguments.

If you don't like the idea of "copyleft", fine, don't participate. Releasing software under the GPL is a charitable donation, and most of the GPL crowd is appreciative. Sun has done something good here.

Also, regarding the GP poster, it is a valid point that it would be nice if Sun's open source releases were GPL, just so they would be compatible with each other and with the bulk of open source code - I don't think it is just "bitching" to request that code donations be done in as useful a form as possible, as long as the request is polite.

Re:GPL v2 and v3 are identical in intent

[bladesjester]

If you "loathe Stallman's crusade", better steer clear of GPL v2 as well.

Yet another person who doesn't understand using a tool on occasion because it is the right tool for a job and using a tool because someone tells you that everything should be freeeeeee.

I refuse to use v3 because it's really starting to show his moral crusade as far as that goes. The man's been wrong-headed for a long long time. That doesn't mean that he doesn't occasionally do something useful. In addition, he tries very very hard to force his views on others (partially in order to remain "relevant" - "GNU/Linux" comes to mind).

I use GPLv2 for my open stuff because it lets those things be open and lets me maintain some control over them (sure, you can fork things, but the original is mine). I don't do it because I think everything should be "Free" or because I like Stallman. I use it because it's occasionally useful.

BIG difference

Also, regarding the GP poster, it is a valid point that it would be nice if Sun's open source releases were GPL, just so they would be compatible with each other and with the bulk of open source code - I don't think it is just "bitching" to request that code donations be done in as useful a form as possible, as long as the request is polite.

He slammed Sun for not releasing *everything* they do under the GPL. That is bitching and fanboyism and was done in anything but a polite manner.

Re:GPL v2 and v3 are identical in intent

[stinerman]

I don't know why you think v2 wasn't part of some moral crusade; it was. Stallman has always been about free software since day one. You're free not to follow his ideology, but don't think that v2 was somehow uncontaminated. That is what the poster was trying to get across to you.

GPLv2 is a good free software license as well as a good open source license. GPLv3 seems to be an even better free software license, but a less-than-popular open source license.

Re:GPL v2 and v3 are identical in intent

[bladesjester]

I don't know why you think v2 wasn't part of some moral crusade; it was

I never said that I didn't think it was part of some moral crusade. It simply wasn't as rabid as what he wants the current (v3) and likely future licenses to be.

v3 is a less than popular license for a few reasons. Among them are the facts that Linux uses v2 exclusively and what seems to be a realization on the part of a lot of people just how rabid Stallman has become (not that he wasn't off before, but he's getting worse as time goes by. It's really kind of frightening to watch).

This is coming from someone who is actually an advocate of open source and has been a voice for it. Articles I've written have helped quite a few businesses to try their hand at using and even releasing open source software. Heck, I even release the stuff I make for my own use as open source most of the time because I figure that if I find it useful, someone else might too.

I'll admit it openly and publicly. I don't like Stallman and I don't agree with his ideology or how he tries to force it on others (being so petty as not to talk to LUGs unless they call themselves "GNU/Linux" groups comes to mind).

Does that mean that I don't see value in some of the things he has done? Certainly not. However, I don't think this blind following of him by so many zealots is a positive thing.

The fact that he's done positive things doesn't mean that he isn't hurting his own cause by the way he does things. The entire world of software isn't going to be "Free" and it *shouldn't* be for the simple fact that people need to eat and not every piece of commercial software is viable as an open source project.

Software and licenses are tools, to be used when they make sense and set aside when they don't make sense, not religions as Stallman and so many of his followers would have you treat them.

Re:GPL v2 and v3 are identical in intent

[stinerman]

This is coming from someone who is actually an advocate of open source and has been a voice for it.

Then there is no doubt that you wouldn't get along with Stallman. Stallman doesn't do "open source"; he does "free software". Open source emphasizes the business and practical aspects of being able to see, reuse, and redistribute code. Free software is about ethics.

RMS has a nice quote relating open source and free software:

"The GNU GPL makes sense in terms of its purpose: freedom and social solidarity. Trying to understand it in terms of the goals and values of open source is like trying understand a CD drive's retractable drawer as a cupholder. You can use it for that, but that is not what it was designed for."

By accident, GPLv2 ended up being a popular license for open source projects. It was meant to be as ideologically driven, crazy, etc. as GPLv3 was. RMS didn't foresee some ways to break the spirit of GPLv2, so he revised it and made it GPLv3. Had he been aware of Tivoization or patent covenants in the early 90s, you can bet that GPLv2 would have had similar clauses as does GPLv3. Essentially, he hasn't become more ideological, he's just lacked the words by which to express his ideology until now.

Re:GPL v2 and v3 are identical in intent

[bladesjester]

Stallman doesn't do "open source"; he does "free software"

You're not telling me anything I don't already know. I am well aware of the difference. In fact, I tend to avoid the "Free" software people because of the zealotry.

It was meant to be as ideologically driven, crazy, etc.

Which is why it wasn't used nearly as much until the practical, reasonable people showed that it didn't have to be a moral crusade. The man is hurting his own bloody cause as I've said countless times before.

It's his "ethics" (particularly his trying to force them on others and the rabid manner in which he does so instead of just saying "here's a license. use it or don't") that is really turning people off to the whole thing.

He's an unreasonable zealot, and people are finally starting to see that. I've seen it for quite a long time, but not everyone has. I think that, for a lot of people, the moment of realization was GPLv3. I also have to say that I really do think he's getting worse as time goes on. I'm honestly expecting to see the guy get diagnosed with dementia, and I find that thought rather sad.

It ticks him off to no end that people have taken what he wanted to be an idealogical tool (basically a religion, really) and used it as a practical one instead of for "moral" reasons. People looked at the GPLv2, went "this is a decent tool, but it's not a religion" and used it.

The truth is that, by and large, the business and software worlds don't want to follow zealots (at least not ones that are painfully obvious) and they aren't on a moral crusade (nor should they be. Affect positive change? Sure, everyone should at least try. Moral crusade? Um, no).

If it wasn't for the practical people out there, nobody would really even care about the GPL for the most part (to be honest, most people wouldn't even know about it). To be perfectly honest, Linus did more to help spread it than Stallman *ever* did (which also has to gall the living daylights out of him).

Your standards are way too low.

[mattgreen]

I don't care how many features the program has. If it can't keep up with my rate of typing, it is a worthless text editor. There are these great things called threads that let you do work off of the UI thread and keep it uncontested. If the IDE programmers are so inept that they cannot do this, then I'm not touching it. And that includes garbage collection. There is NO reason a GC should halt the UI thread. Making the application unresponsive for 5-10 seconds occasionally is extremely rude and disrupts the programmer's flow. I find it sad that people put up with this crap and actually defend it.

It is crappy engineering all around. Using a language that is not suited for the desktop, with a memory management system that is not tailored for the particular needs of the application, failing to delegate tasks that assist the programmer to secondary threads, and then consuming large chunks of RAM. Gee, what a great product!

What Emacs is and what it isn't regarding NetBeans

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm seeing a lot of pathetic comment about Emacs...

I'm a big fan of modern IDEs (I'm personally using IntelliJ IDEA but YMMV) but -- altough they do a lot of things that Emacs doesn't -- from a "text editing" point of view they are decades behind Emacs. I've got constantly IntelliJ IDEA opened, as well as Emacs. There are simply things that you cannot do efficiently with Eclipse/Netbeans/IDEA (or JEdit / TextMate / etc.).

On again I repeat it: I love when my IDE tells me "construct xxx is unlikely to have useful semantics" or "statement yyy is unreachable" or "condition A shall always evaluate to B". That and so many other nice things which make it so I'll never program again without a modern IDE. BUT you are a clueless fool if you think the "text editor" of your modern IDE comes anywhere near as close as what the Emacs "text editor" is.

Oh and for you XML freaks, real-time RelaxNG validation on Emacs smokes any other modern IDE out there (and, yup, it's faster too).

Best of both world for me? A modern IDE like, say, NetBeans (refactoring facilities, "programming by intention", etc.) whose "text editor" (if you insist on calling it that way) would be Emacs... Meanwhile I'm stuck with IDEA + an Emacs plugin (but of course it only mimics 0.01% of what the real thing has to offer) and of course the real Emacs always opened...

Ah, kids and their shiny toys and their lame excuses blaming that "text editor" they never understood... If only they knew what they are missing and what we're all missing with the 'dumbization' of the programming crowd...

You can't come out and say "but look XYZ does ABC, it's obviously way more advanced than Emacs". You see what you're gaining with a modern IDE but you're not even close to understand what you're missing. Once again, I repeat, this comes from a modern-IDE fan. But I do very well know that altough modern IDEs offer tremendous benefits they've also a very "stone age" feeling when it comes to "editing text" (you know, stuff that we happen to do when we program ;)

P.S: I happen to know enough vi basics to find my way on Un*x system not equipped with Emacs ;)

Re:WEHT cornbread?

[Anonymous Coward]

Beans knocked cornbread out of sight :-(

eclipse can use your ant build file

[Raul Acevedo]

Either create the project with "Use existing ant build file", or once you've created it, create a new ant builder for the project and point it to the right build.xml.

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

You fucking idiot. Standing by your virtues is not fanboyism, it's integrity.

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[bladesjester]

You fucking idiot. Standing by your virtues is not fanboyism, it's integrity.

Trying to force your "virtues" on other people is not a sign of integrity. It's a sign of fanaticism.

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

How much did Microsoft pay you to say that?

From an article from March 27th, 2005

[egghat]

Cell phones adventures

March 27th, 2005 | John Carmack

Come on, Netbeans and Java have really amde some progress in the last two and a half years.

Netbeans 6.0 (even in beta) is good. Everyone who isn't married to Eclipse should take some days to test Netbeans again. Performancewise I can't find any major differences between Netbeans and Eclipse.

Bye egghat

Re: Compiling from within vi

[some guy I know]

The fact that you don't have to close the text-editing window to compile is what I liked. Vim, unfortunately, can't do that

On most UNIX-type systems (e.g., Linux and BSD), you can type ^Z (or <CTRL>+Z, if you prefer that nomenclature) to temporarily suspend vi (but don't forget :w<RET> first to save your changes), do your make or whatever, then type %<RET> to resume your vi session.
This works from xterm as well as from a VT.
If you're using (g)vim, you can have a macro set up that will save, compile, and insert error messages in the file you're working on, so you can jump right to the lines in error.
(I'd post it here, but I've long since lost it (since I now use another method).)