Oracle Outlines Plans for Sun Products, Casts Doubt on NetBeans

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that a recent FAQ released by Oracle outlines the plans for many of Sun's popular products like GlassFish, MySQL, and NetBeans. Many are worried at some of the possible avenues the decisions outlined could lead to, especially with respect to NetBeans. "What should have happened, Oracle should not have missed a beat and should have announced work on Oracle plugins for NetBeans and active Oracle support of NetBeans. This type of announcement would have brought a large and some-what skeptical NetBeans community much closer to Oracle. It would have been a big win for Oracle. NetBeans will continue to grow either way - but Oracle has missed a big chance to really change perceptions and at the same time move their tools to another level. What JDeveloper lacks is buzz, a wealth of community developed plugins, a wealth of support for other languages and a very, very large community. And of course it does not offer a platform in the NetBeans and Eclipse sense of the word. This is a huge missed opportunity for Oracle."

Comments

NetBeans? Really?

[qoncept]

I wasn't aware anyone seriously used it. I used it for school and I've been on Eclipse since I started doing real projects.

Re:NetBeans? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

for j2ee it is the best ide...

Re:NetBeans? Really?

[gilesjuk]

It's slower than Eclipse but it does quite a few things Eclipse doesn't do well. A visual Java swing application designer that works for starters!

It's more stable too.

Given Oracle's Java procedure support in Oracle they're missing a trick, they should integrate SQL Developer and NetBeans to create a really good Java/Warehouse/BI tool.

Re:NetBeans? Really?

[kaffiene]

As a Java developer of many years experience, I've been using NB since about version 5. That's when it started being better than Eclipse and Eclipse starting turning into a plugin nightmare.

Re:NetBeans? Really?

[Hurricane78]

Uuum, you mean that huge slow mess of co-dependent modules and shit, that you have to wade through for weeks to get to anything usable, that is called Eclipse?

Really! as a Java, J2ME, Haskell and web developer, I stopped after two fucking weeks! It's even worse than the Miranda IM! Hell, it's worse than installing Gentoo from Stage 1! And that means something!

Sorry for the hate. But sometimes, hate is deserved.

I'm happy if you are happy with it. And in system administration, I can also be a bit that way.
But I... well... in programming... I just want to code...

I can do with Kate, or any basic code editor, and a reasonably scriptable shell, if I have to. No problem.
But when I get the possibility to get more without a big hassle, I go for it.

Before NetBeans, I used JBuilder, because I was used to Delphi, which I got to from the old Pascal days. (Man, was Turbo Pascal a great environment, or was it?)

Conclusion: Everyone has its own motives, interests and tastes. Everyhing is relative. Stop being so egocentric, and acting like we don't do "real projects" like the oh so great guru that you think you are. Because with that narrow view on the world, I seriously doubt you even understand real "guruness". :)
(But hope you'll get there. And me too. :)

Re:NetBeans? Really?

[SnapShot]

I agree. I used Eclipse for years but I've started using Netbeans 6.7 for more and more. The problem we have where I work is that we do PHP projects and Java projects. Six or eight months ago we were having real trouble getting getting PDT to play nice and, so far, NetBeans just works and switching between projects is very easy.

Anyway, they are both great IDE's that continue to get better and better. If I have to switch back to Eclipse is won't be a major sacrifice, but I'll be unhappy that there won't be a free IDE competitor to keep the Eclipse devs motivated :-)

Re:NetBeans? Really?

[upuv]

I have to agree. Eclipse has become an un-usable mess.

I actually went back to a decent text editor. When I went back into the repository I found I wrote more code with the text editor than I did with Ecilpse by shear line count. I also had less bugs. This I completely did not expect at all. I also billed less time to "life cycle" AKA bug fixes. I guess looking back at it now I can attribute it to having less distractions and being required to actually research the interfaces I was using.

Now I definitely want to get a decent IDE. I believe it would make my code better. But Eclipse is not it.

Seriously how the hell does an editor/ide require over 1Gig of ram to run efficiently. That's just crazy. Can't even run it on a 32bit machine.

Maybe I'll take a look at NetBeans again.

Re:NetBeans? Really?

[MemoryDragon]

It is not that much slower and the things it does well are pretty important like having a decent JEE Plugin, heavens even after 4 years and 4 releases Eclipses WTP still refuses sometimes to deploy and does not even tell you what is wrong. For heavens sake how hard is it really just to jar something and deploy it?
Anyway I have given up on both platforms and am fully on Intellij, it combines the flexibility of Eclipse with the ease of use in Netbeans and adds its own set of excellent tools on top of both platforms.

Netbeans just isn't there

[mapnjd]

Unfortunately for Netbeans zealots, it has never caught up with Eclipse. It may have surpassed it temporarily for certain apps (think Grails support - but look at STS 2.2.0). It's also not as good as IntelliJ IDEA (previously, always non-free).

Yes, both Netbeans and Eclipse are also RCP platforms, but how many real Netbeans platform apps are there? (The Nokia one on the web site is vapourware - yes it shows a real customer RAN - without their permission, I should add! - but it's never been a product delivered to customers). Real Eclipse RCP apps do exist (XMind, Lotus Smartsuite...). Realistically, they both over good RCP platforms (one pure Java, one SWT) but Oracle won't really care about that.

As for JDeveloper - well it's a typical Oracle product - if you're in an Oracle house, it's pretty good, but no, it's not got a large userbase or community supporting it.

Oracle should let Netbeans drift off into open source land. Perhaps it'll thrive? I don't know. JDeveloper's functionality should be ported to Eclipse (along with SQL Developer, while we're at it).

Oracle are great at giving you tools once you've signed up for the ride, and why not rebase your products on the best? Which in my opinion is Eclipse.

Re:Netbeans just isn't there

[Deth_Master]

Hmm, as a java development platform (and as a C/C++ development IDE) it is unrivaled by Eclipse. Things seem to work so much smoother in netbeans. You don't have to configure the shit out of it to use it. Most stuff follows the convention over configuration principle. At least that's the way it seems to me
Every time I use eclipse I'm surprised at the exceptional amount of options there are to do something simple. I rarely use them. Most of the options could be done with a couple bits of typing anyway.
As for the RCP stuff, I don't particularly care about that. I think eclipse has the upper hand in that stuff, as that's what it was designed to be in the first place, unlike Netbeans, which was designed to be a Java IDE.

Re:Netbeans just isn't there

[Deth_Master]

I think that might be part of the reason I don't like Eclipse. I don't get the functionality I want without customizing the crap out of it. That might be useful for some, but not for me. I like power, but I also like convention, so long as it follows the convention I use.

JDeveloper is great...

[wandazulu]

...if you want to interact with Oracle products. I tried really hard to use it, even using it as both a Java IDE and a PL/SQL IDE and, while yes, it does work, I found it too slow and clunky to just "bang out some code" when you need to write up a throwaway program really really fast.

But, like I said, if you want total interaction with your database or app server (assuming that app server is oc4j), then I suppose, if you have to use only a single tool, I guess, well, shrug, I guess it's better than nothing...I guess.

It's the database, stupid.

[Animats]

MySQL matters. NetBeans, not so much. Most of the web runs on MySQL. There aren't that many good open-source alternatives. (Oracle owns BerkeleyDB, too.) PostgreSQL is about it, and because that's Berkeley-licensed code, not GPL, it can be forked and the open version abandoned.

Oracle has to dump something. I'm surprised they kept the SPARC line alive. It just doesn't seem to be necessary any more, and it was a money drain for Sun.

Re:It's the database, stupid.

[shogarth]

SPARC is still quite relevant; there are few things as nice as running a multi-threaded set of applications on the Sun Niagara chips. If I were a database software outfit I would want to make sure there were two architectures out there (IBM POWER and something else) focusing on enterprise performance rather than media creation/encoding.

Take a look. Is there anything in the Intel or AMD product pipeline that will get you 2 x 10 Gb ethernet, 64 thread pipelines, and 128 GB of RAM in a 1U box? Even better, the price is really competative with buying the same performance worth of x86 gear in multiple boxes by the time you think about rack space, cooling networking and all the rest of the data center head aches.

Re:It's the database, stupid.

[dingen]

I'm surprised they kept the SPARC line alive. It just doesn't seem to be necessary any more, and it was a money drain for Sun.

Well actually, the most common platform for Oracle deployment is Solaris on SPARC. So it doesn't seem so strange to me that Oracle isn't ditching their most used hardware platform now that they own it.

Consider the source.

[tomhudson]

TFA is quoting Gartner. When is the last time Gartner got something right? It's full of weasel words. Lots of "If ..."

Read what Oracle wrote. They're not abandoning NetBeans.

What are Oracle's plans for NetBeans?

Oracle has a strong track record of demonstrating commitment to choice for Java developers. As such, NetBeans is expected to provide an additional open source option and complement to the two free tools Oracle already offers for enterprise Java development: Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse. While Oracle JDeveloper remains Oracle's strategic development tool for the broad portfolio of Oracle Fusion Middleware products and for Oracle's next generation of enterprise applications, developers will be able to use whichever free tool they are most comfortable with for pure Java and Java EE development: JDeveloper, Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, or NetBeans.

Fuck Gartner. Fuck them in the heart.

Re:Consider the source.

[tomhudson]

What's non-committal about "NetBeans is expected to provide an additional open source option and complement to the two free tools Oracle already offers for enterprise Java development"

They say the same thing about OpenOffice, They expect netbeans to continue to remain a viable tool. Their history shows that they don't just throw tech out after spending money to buy it. Example: They didn't kill off InnoDB. they said virtually the same thing for OpenOffice

Oracle has a history of developing complete, integrated, and open products, making integration quicker and less costly for our customers. Based on the open ODF standard, OpenOffice is expected to create a compelling desktop integration bridge for our enterprise customers and offers consumers another choice on the desktop. After the transaction closes, Oracle plans to continue developing and supporting OpenOffice as open source.

NetBeans, OO, and MySQL are going to be open source projects under Oracles' roof. Being open source, it's not like Oracle can kill off any of them. They may not throw much financial or other muscle behind netbeans, but they don't have to for it to continue. If it were a closed-source product, that would be a different story. It's not. The only thing that can kill it is user disinterest.

In other words, Gartner are just trolling, like always.

As if Oracle cares...

[Angst Badger]

I hate to belabor the obvious here, but Oracle is not terribly concerned with what developers think about them. There are two reasons companies buy Oracle licenses: they either absolutely have to have them, or someone much further up the chain than the developers -- at least in most companies -- thinks that they do. From the altitude in the org chart where those decisions are made, there's no difference between us and the janitors.

Either? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

IMO both Netbeans and Eclipse are a waste of time. What is the point of an IDE that can't even get basic text editing UI right?