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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.
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
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:
- 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 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