Oracle & Sun Fall Out Over Netbeans Endorsement. Do Developers Care?
In that last week or so, you will no doubt have read about Oracle and Sun having a public falling out over the precise words used to describe Oracle’s attitude to Netbeans. The question at issue has been: does Oracle “endorse” Netbeans, or has it “adopted” Netbeans? It seems that Sun wanted Oracle to say that it has both “endorsed” and “adopted” Netbeans. Whereas, Oracle wanted to say only that it “endorses” Netbeans; in comparison with Eclipse and JDeveloper, which it has “adopted”.
I don’t wish to be unfair, but it also seems that, from their rather strong choice of words, some of the people involved in this spat may have an inflated sense of their own importance. Why inflated? Well, on the whole, I just don’t see a lot of evidence that developers care much about which particular Java IDEs Oracle does, or does not, endorse or adopt. Surely, if they did, JDeveloper (Oracle’s own offering) would be more popular than it is. In the Java IDE world, I see only Eclipse and Netbeans having significant mindshare among developers.
I’m not saying that JDeveloper isn’t a great product. It might well be. But the only time I’ve ever heard developers talking about JDeveloper was when Oracle first released it many years ago - Hey, have a look at this - Oracle has released an IDE based on Borland/Inprise JBuilder. And after that, nothing. This contrasts with developers rather often discussing the relative merits of Netbeans and Eclipse. And, based on the conversations I’m hearing, I’d say Sun is going to have a big success on its hands with Netbeans 5.0 - there’s a lot of buzz around new features like the Matisse GUI editor. And, the word is starting to spread that products like Java Enterprise Studio, based on Netbeans, have more useful features - like roundtrip UML editing.
So after the strong public words, what have we learnt? Seemingly, we’ve learnt that Oracle doesn’t use Netbeans (one of the two leading Java IDEs); and that Oracle sees that as an important/impressive thing to let the world know. I have to say, I’m left wondering why…
Post a Comment