NetBeans Still Thinks It Competes With Eclipse
It's competing with its own past, which is an impossible task. Just ask the Applet people.
Roumen: Why Doesn't Sun Want to Join Eclipse Foundation
Ok... this question keeps coming all the time. Everytime we announce a new release of NetBeans someone asks it. So in case somebody asks you, you can send them a link to this blog entry. Thanks, Gregg, for summarizing this.
Question: These Sun developer tools have some great features, but why try to do it all? Why not just join the Eclipse Foundation and have one focused effort to use for building tools? In other words, why couldn't all of Sun's leading-edge tools features just be delivered as Eclipse plugins?
A: There are several reasons:
He gave six reasons. And every one of them is wrong. Wrong not in the technical sense, but in the sense that it won't win anybody over to their side who are not already there.
I'm fairly open minded to the new version of NetBeans. I had a little issue about their web site using the wrong license, but that seems to have been fixed with the 5.0 beta's and with the final release. I just downloaded and install NetBeans 5.0. And it looks great. (Although the new class wizard still generates a no-arg constructor, which, if you think about it, does more harm than good.)
Here's my reaction to Sun's reasoning. (The fact I'm still thinking NetBeans as a Sun product rather than an independent Open Source product may be indication of the ill of NetBeans marketing.)
"SWT is not WORA"
This is so 1997. WORA, while a good ideal, hurts Java as an ideology. The first round of WORA war got us a Microsoft technology (.NET) that competes with Java. The second round of WORA war got us an IBM technology (SWT) that competes with Swing. I'm not sure Sun wants to fight another WORA war. For what? To lose the hand held market place?
"Look at this bug (SWT/Mac Issues)"
Don't look at other peoples bugs. Look at your own. I reported many bugs to Sun. Took them months to just acknowledge them. Some has gone on years without being fixed.
"Ours is one big bundle (Theirs you have to piece together)"
My version of Eclipse comes with my operating system installation with everything configured just right. Even for C++ or Python development.
"Look at what people built with our platform"
They look great! So?
"We are 31% market share, and people download us"
J++ were, like, what, 85%. I've downloaded NetBeans many times in 2005. I actually downloaded it three times in the past two weeks (rc1, rc2, and final.) I did not download Eclipse this year at all. It came with my operating system distribution.
"Competition is a good thing"
You bet it is.
In conclusion
Come on guys. You are selling an Open Source technology. Tell us what it can do and how it does it better than anybody else's open source or commercial products. If it fulfills a need, people with that need will use it. Bashing Eclipse gets you guys nowhere.
WORA is a winning technical proposition, but a lousy marketing slogan with a losing track record. Say it one more time, I'll disable Java in my browser. Oh wait, it already doesn't work. (There is no 64-bit browser plugin in the amd64 JDK.)
The best marketing approach for NetBeans? Make a non-paid, non-Sun, non-NetBeans core team member come out and say good things publicly about NetBeans. I know someone who did exactly that.
Re: NetBeans Still Thinks It Competes With Eclipse
Re: NetBeans Still Thinks It Competes With Eclipse
Does Eclipse run on the new Intel Macs? No. Does NetBeans run there? Yes.
Can you distribute one package of your software for all platforms, including webstart from Eclipse? No. Can you do that with NetBeans? Yes.
These are real issues real customers are having.
I agree with you that articles like the one from Tim Wheeler promote us very well. The goal of this post was not to promote NetBeans but to answer once and for all the question why don't we want to join Eclipse foundation. Thanks for understanding :)
Re: NetBeans Still Thinks It Competes With Eclipse
Roumen,
Thanks for the comment. Like I said, I have no problems with what you are saying on the technical level. As a matter of fact, I'm rather on the Swing side of thngs when it comes down to GUI Toolkit choices in Java.
What I have realized over the past few years is that all the purity talk only serves to shrink the community. You may have good intentions, but it's the end result that counts.
Re: NetBeans Still Thinks It Competes With Eclipse
Re: NetBeans Still Thinks It Competes With Eclipse
Re: NetBeans Still Thinks It Competes With Eclipse
Re: NetBeans Still Thinks It Competes With Eclipse
Re: NetBeans Still Thinks It Competes With Eclipse
I am not sure I agree with your thesis that WORA did more harm than good, nor that we would be better served by Sun concentrating on Eclipse plugins.
SWT seems like a good alternative to Swing for writing apps targeted to Windows. My Linux-using friends are not terribly impressed with SWT performance, and those of us on the Mac are truly not impressed yet. If the Eclipse folks throw more resources at it, I suspect they can impress us, but they do have a ways to go.
That SWT performs poorly on the Mac, despite heroic efforts by Andre and others, does not invalidate the SWT approach. It does, however, imply that there is some benefit to the WORA rhetoric. Swing apps do work pretty well on my Mac, in the main. They also work pretty well for my Linux using friends. I believe that happens because developers using Swing are usually willing to do some work to make it function on platforms not their own, and that work usually pays off.
I ran the new version of NetBeans. I found IDEA preferable, but it was sure snappier than Eclipse, and the built in profiler worked pretty well. It had the refactorings I most needed, and it looked pretty keen on the Mac - less like a windows app, IMO. (That last can be argued, and I am willing to accept that other's aesthetics might differ.)
Again, this is not a war, and we are not trying to 'take no prisoners'. It does, however, point out the benefits of a multiple offerings. It shows that there is a place for a Swing-based app, and that this can have performance benefits.
Scott