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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."
...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.
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.
find ~your -name '*base* | xargs chown
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.
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.
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