From the time that Sun Microsystem created Java Café and Java One for developing Java Applications and then acquired NetBeans first as parallel with those and later as consolidating and replacing them until it included further features to develop Fortran and C and C++ and other languages I was an avid user of this easy to use IDE. NetBeans evolved and evolved and for the goals that it had it was much better than Visual Studio, for instance being Intelligent Sense not only in showing the code but also showing the documentation with hyper texting to move around the documents.
NetBeans was acquired by Oracle at the time that Sun Microsystem was acquired by Oracle. There were speculations that support for the NetBeans will be stopped and the IDE will be scrapped. Some people hastily switched to JDeveloper and Eclipse but most Java programmers kept the hope and Oracle also showed sensibility in continuing funding the NetBeans IDE as its own product and NetBeans improved to its present 8.2 Version.
In November/December 2016 digital edition of Java Magazine editor gives some news that NetBeans has been moved from its Oracle home to Apache Foundation. I did not find this depressing as some might speculate. I know Apache a better place for such thing. Hence, I leave the whole story to the powerful pen of him.
NetBeans
Gets a New Life—or Does It?
The transition
from Oracle to the Apache Software Foundation marks the beginning of an
uncertain new era for the Java IDE.
At
JavaOne this year, the NetBeans community announced that the project was moving
from its long-time home at Oracle to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). In a
history that dates back some 20 years, this will be NetBeans’ fifth new home, showing the
product’s remarkable power of endurance. An important
question is whether working under the aegis of the ASF will bring NetBeans new life
and new aficionados, or whether it signals the final chapter of a storied
lifeline.
As
many readers know, NetBeans is one of the four principal Java IDEs. The others
are the open source Eclipse from the Eclipse Foundation, IntelliJ IDEA from
JetBrains (consisting of an open source version and a higher-end closed source version),
and JDeveloper (a free, closed source IDE from Oracle). What few readers might
know is that NetBeans was the first of
these products— beating Borland’s JBuilder by a year. (JDeveloper,
which was based on JBuilder, was next, followed years later by Eclipse and
IntelliJ.)
NetBeans
became a popular Java IDE because of several features, most especially the
lightness of its use. While competing products had a long setup cycle for new
projects and a comparatively “heavy” feel, NetBeans was great for coding on the fly and always felt
light and responsive. While it lacked some of its competitors’ code management features, it was
the first to offer a built-in execution profiler and, if I recall correctly, the
only one to include a small-scale J2EE server, OC4J, to quickly test web
projects locally. It was also
the first IDE to offer a top-quality Swing based GUI-development
tool, called Matisse.
That’s
a lot of quality to come from what was originally a student project at Charles University
in Prague. (The core development team for NetBeans has remained primarily based
in Prague, although marketing and other functions have been based at various
times in the United States and elsewhere.)
Eventually,
NetBeans was acquired by Sun, where it was open sourced. And through the 2011
acquisition of Sun, NetBeans became part of Oracle. At that point, I was quite
surprised to read of Oracle’s commitment to continue developing NetBeans. After
all, the company already offered
JDeveloper for free and sponsored Oracle-specific packages
and extensions for Eclipse. But actually, Oracle did more than just commit to
supporting the platform’s development and promotion; it also began using portions
of NetBeans in its own products,
specifically JDeveloper and VisualVM, and eventually a variety of
other development tools. For this reason, even with the move to the ASF,
NetBeans has secured a commitment from Oracle to underwrite its development for
two more releases: the upcoming 8.x version and the 9.0 release.
If
you were to view NetBeans purely as a programming environment, its fate after
Oracle’s commitment expires would be most uncertain. Although many projects
under the ASF aegis have
flourished (Maven, Hadoop, Spark, and others), more than a few
projects have migrated to the ASF only to die there. (See the Apache Attic for
a list of defunct projects.)
However, over the years, NetBeans evolved from an IDE into a
platform consisting of large-scale components that can be assembled in different ways
to form
desktop applications. This architecture uses a rather different approach than
Eclipse’s OSGi-based system of modules and bundles. (This page compares the
Eclipse and NetBeans architectures.)
Numerous companies— including Oracle—have exploited the benefits of NetBeans’
architecture
and built applications whose runtime includes the platform components.
These
companies have an interest in continuing the forward direction of NetBeans, and
some have committed to work on NetBeans in its new home. I expect—but obviously I don’t
know—that they will contribute either directly or by engaging NetBeans’
current cohort of developers to continue developing the platform. In addition, the
community of users, many of whom are truly dedicated to NetBeans, might well
step up and begin
contributing. It’s difficult to project the extent of
participation because very few projects with so large a user base have been
migrated to the ASF, and so there is little history to provide guidance.
For
users of NetBeans, though, nothing need be done for now or in the near term. The
9.0 release is scheduled for August 2017 and will cover Java 9. By that time,
we will surely have more insight into the transition of NetBeans, the level of
activity, and the level of support from both commercial users and the developer
community.
Andrew
Binstock, Editor in Chief javamag_us@oracle.com
@platypusguy
November/December 2016 digital edition of Java Magazine
Java:
Number One Development Platform:
13
Billion Devices Run Java
ATMs,
Smartcards, POS Terminals, Blu-ray Players, Set Top Boxes, Multifunction Printers,
PCs, Servers, Routers, Switches, Parking Meters, Smart Meters, Lottery Systems,
Airplane Systems, IoT Gateways, Programmable Logic Controllers, Optical
Sensors, Wireless M2M Modules, Access Control Systems, Medical Devices, Building
Controls, Automobiles…
