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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."
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.
Bus error in your favour. Collect 200kB
...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.
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.
Fuck Gartner. Fuck them in the heart.
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.
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.
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.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
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 :-)
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.