NetBeans is targeted at being the number-one open source IDE

Markus Eisele
2
I found a developer.com article which talked about an "Oracle spokesperson" which was interviewed by InternetNews.com.

Since the beginning of the Sun/Oracle merger the rumors about which products will go and which ones will stay do not stop. And many people are still unshure about the future. This is more or less driven by anybody speculating. Especially if they are "officals" like Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation who said:
"Having NetBeans and Eclipse competing with each other in offering free IDEs for Java developers is not helping Java any longer. So we'd be open to doing something to bring those communities together. The big win is that it's not the Eclipse or the NetBeans community, it's the Java community."
(Source: developer.com)

The Oracle spokesperson, who was not named expressed what we all already heard:
"Both products [ed: Eclipse and NetBeans] are being actively developed and are both part of Oracle's Developer Tools strategy"
[...]
"NetBeans is targeted at being the number-one open source IDE for all of the Java technologies"
[...]
"Its focus is to ensure that Java developers of any skill level can be productive in building with and taking fullest advantage of all the Java technologies."
(Source: developer.com)

And this is still what to expect if you ask me. I had the pleasure to talk to some Oracle people at ODTUG Kaleidoscope this year and I tried asking them the same questions about NetBeans and Eclipse. The outcome was basically the same. NetBeans will be a community product supported but not driven by Oracle.
Eclipse on the other hand will be supported as it already is until now. Beside the donated projects (e.g. EclipseLink) there will be the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE) which:

[...] "is specifically aimed at supporting developers building applications on the Oracle stack. The Oracle stack includes products such as Oracle Database, Oracle Coherence, and Oracle WebLogic Server. "
(Source: developer.com)

What was not mentioned by the spokesperson is GlassFish. I personaly expect it to be supported by OEPE also in the future.
For me it seems as if Eclipse is as important to Oracle as NetBeans is. Both are very broadly used IDEs and have their users. Nobody is going to change this. And if somebody is expecting that Oracle might drop support for one or the other I would love to know what their reasons should be.

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2Comments

  1. Hi,

    i think the article says it all: "NetBeans is targeted at being the number-one open source IDE for all of the Java technologies"

    Netbeans is and will be a nice IDE for coding Java etc, whereas Eclipse is a gorgeous rich client platform that is based on OSGI and extensively used by large companys (IBM built Lotus Notes 8 on top of the Eclipse RCP).
    And by the way the Eclipse RCP has some nice plugins for coding Java (JDT) ;-).

    To make it short: Eclipse is so much more than an IDE, that major corporations can't afford for it to die ;-)

    Best Regards
    Mario Gutsche

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  2. Hi Mario,
    Netbeans was a platform long before Eclipse was born, but it wasn't marketed. Look at Geerjan's blog (http://blogs.sun.com/geertjan/) if you need to be convinced of this.
    Netbeans is fully OSGI compatible (on Felix, not Equinox (alpha)).
    And yes Netbeans is swing based so you don't have these 32/64 bits differences, GTK, etc.
    Cheers,
    Emmanuel

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