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Sun Microsystems acquires NetBeans
mischief writes "There's a press release on java.sun.com about Sun acquiring NetBeans. " Word of this deal has been bouncing around for a while, so it appears that the rumour mill had this one right. With the acquisition of StarOffice, one has to wonder what Sun's in the mood for next.
This is not neccessarily a bad thing, but Sun has been in the habit recently of seriously botching up things that would have otherwise been a really good idea. Maybe they really are trying to cash in on the "free" R&D and development they can get from the Linux community by trying to get as many developers interested in *their* products as they can.
My 1/50th of a Dollar
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
Official Sun Roadmap
1. Read Business at the Speed of Thought by William Gates
2. Determine competition.
3. Imitate competition and buy everyone.
4. Start e-mail chain and give all recipients of the e-mail an Ultra-5.
Brad Johnson
Advisory Editor
Brad Johnson
NetBeans is a development tool for Java. It features all the usual stuff you find in a good IDE: editor, debugger, forms and components. One of the reasons it's getting popular really quick now, is its flexible design. I think the upcoming version integrates togetherJ (as a plugin) which is an UML oriented development tool. This tool allows you to write java code and watch the UML diagram change or vice versa.
Oh yeah, netbeans is written in 100% Java (using the swing classes) which makes it cross platform.
Probably some readers of this thread are scratching their heads and wondering about performance now. I can assure you performance is quite satisfying provided you have 64 Mb or more of memory. Once the program is loaded (takes about 30 seconds on my PC), you hardly notice you are working with a Java program.
Jilles
It's a Java IDE written entirely in Java such that as long as you had a 100% compat JRE 1.1, you could use it. It was also a free download (forget the original licence, but you didn't get source code with it). Had lots of 'visual' elements to it, and was generally looked on as one of the better low-cost IDEs out there. I used it for a bit, and while I didn't like it, it was good for the state of the technology today. (why oh why must nearly all windoze dev build with the MDI interface: one application window with multiple sub windows, instead of one window per file?!)
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Sun recently gave up on producing it's own IDE (Java Workshop as reported here previously), but the IDE market is still hot (95% of all Java programmers, I'd speculate, want to program visual, and Java Beans does help). As long as NetBeans remains free, I see no problems with this - Sun still wins in the long run because it *is* Java that you develop for, which is all the more power to Sun. I think we do need to watch Sun as their actions are similar to MS, but I believe there's some good at Sun that will continue to improve for free/open source software
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Furthering their vision of the network computer, java, and running "dot com" businesses while making Linux less and less of a viable product for large corporations will allow Linux to remain a small-time operating systems. Now that Sun's Solaris license allows free use to non-commercial users, they're on the "Free OS" turf, too. (Yes, I know about the open source issues, let's not even go there.)
Sun Microsystems is making some very smart moves and I'll be interested to see where it plays out. Although their popularity with Slashdot users and other OSS fans is probably low right now, it's worthwhile to realize that OSS users is not where the significant market share is. Sun is strong with the big boys, and getting stronger. I'll be interested to see how it plays out in the long run.
--
Daniel Baker - dbaker@cuckoo.com - dbaker@distributed.net
- Brings just a little more control of Java (invented and developed by Sun) back to Sun. Especially good for Sun after that mess with MicroSoft in which they essentially lost some of their control over the language. (More to follow when the case makes it's way through the courts. )
- Brings some Java development tool expertise inside of Sun. Let's face it, Sun has the major nuts when it comes to advancing the Java language but their development tools are less than perfect. NetBeans produces some good tools and is not so big that Sun would have to take over another major player.
As with all acquisitions, wait and see what the real outcome will be.--
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
IBM released their version of the 1.1.8 (final) JDK and JRE for Linux last month.
It is fairly fast (only somewhat slower in some areas than the 'Official' SunSoft version), native threads, comes with a JIT compiler, and is anywhere from 5-10 times faster than the the Blackdown 1.1.7 VM and 100-100,000 (!) times faster than the Java VM in Netscape 4.7 for Linux, according to CaffineMark 3.0. (Personal testing, your milage may vary).
It can be downloaded from .
Not Open Source, but still a step in the right direction. IBM has also stated its intention to port Java 2 (1.2) for Linux next.
jf
I wonder how well Sun's partners are taking this.
After forking out up to $1million for being a Java Licensee - and then seeing it given away under the community license this must be a real kick in the teeth.
IBM don't really care, as VA is all about IBM consultancy, but Inprise and Symantec must be stinging badly.
Its even worse for the small developers out there. Whilst NetBeans was a separate entity - not my cup of tea, but respectable nonetheless - there was an even playing field. Sun purchasing NetBeans AND giving away the entry level tool is a real downer on third party developers producing IDE's and development assistance tools.
The smaller developers only hope is that Sun do what they have done to most products in the past and give them "The Kiss of Death". Given their commitment to Linux todate this could of course be deliberate policy :-)
IBM released their version of the 1.1.8 (final) JDK and JRE for Linux last month.
It is fairly fast (only somewhat slower in some areas than the 'Official' SunSoft version), native threads, comes with a JIT compiler, and is anywhere from 5-10 times faster than the the Blackdown 1.1.7 VM and 100-100,000 (!) times faster than the Java VM in Netscape 4.7 for Linux, according to CaffineMark 3.0. (Personal testing, your milage may vary).
It can be downloaded from here.
Not Open Source, but still a step in the right direction. IBM has also stated its intention to port Java 2 (1.2) for Linux next.
jf
Anyway, according to this InfoWorld article, "Sun will release" a Java 1.2 port for Linux in "early 2000" with the Blackdown porting group. Not big on details, and Sun haven't done a press release. It's not clear if Sun will be making it available to download from it's site, but that's the implication. However, the article also states that this release will include Sun's nice HotSpot compiler.
I just installed in on a 2xPII/333 w/128Mb running NT4SP5, JDK1.2.2
It takes around 25 seconds to start up but the memory usage before I do anything is 36Mb.
Loading the MemoryView example pushed the memory usage to 49Mb.
It certainly isn't lightweight on resources, and performance feels a little sluggish (but not annoyingly so) but the features look good.
I used to do java development on a pentium 133 with 64 Mb. It was fast enough for me until I started using swing (beta versions at first). The problem was the amount of memory (i was working on a NT computer that also functioned as a webserver and fileserver), once the application had loaded, the response was pretty good. Interestingly performance dropped significantly if we used a JIT. This is probably because of the overhead in class loading.
It's not so much the megahertz that counts but the amount of memory you have. At my work I have a PII 350 with 196 MB. I upgraded the memory a few months ago because of sluggish performance with Java apps. 196 Mb is of course plenty.
Generally I don't notice much performance difference with my PC at home (PII233, 64 Mb) unless the application is rather big (such as netbeans).
I think for netbeans, anything between 64 and 128 Mb should be sufficient.
Jilles
When Sun first announced that they were dropping Java Workstop and Java Studio, this was a good thing because it provided incentive for other companies to provide the tools. Now sun has all of a sudden jumped back into the tools market. I'm sure it's no coincidence that JW was dropped and Netbeans aquired in this short a span of time. I know I personally would be more satisfied to see Sun concentrate on the Java itself and delivering it's write once run anywhere promise on more platforms. It would also help improve java's image as an "open" standard if Sun leaves tool development up to the companies that do it best.
Blender And Linux Fan
This is ridiculous. Java and Linux are orthogonal to one another. Java can, should, and does (to an unsatisfying degree) run on Linux as well as it runs anywhere else. Java is at best a very weak argument for Solaris, especially given the fact that JVMs/JITs are generally faster on Wintel than they are on SPARC/Solaris.
Java is a language, a set of tools and APIs, and a run-time environment which can run on any OS. Linux is just one of the operating systems that can support Java. They are not equivalent in any meaningful way.
The Java model should in principle be warmly accepted by the Linux crowd - why all the hostility to Java? I think we're all agreed that portable apps and code re-use are a good thing, and that complete binary compatibility makes it possible to do things in network computing that aren't otherwise possible. (To the flamers - I realize there are other ways to do some of this, I also recognize none of them has all of Java's strengths. Whether you like it or not, you have to admit that Java is cool technology, and comes closer to realizing the "write once, run anywhere" dream than anything else. (And it's a lot better in that respect now than it was a year ago...))
Why not, instead of flaming, work to make Linux the best darn Java platform out there? It could be.
Personally, I'd love to be able to run the exact same apps on my nextgen Palm, my company-issue Windows laptop, and my home Linux box. We're not all that far away from that now.
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last