Is Sun taking the Microsoft way to capturing the Java IDE market with NetBeans?
I just read a news item that said "Sun’s plans tie Java and the latest version of NetBeans tightly together".
This new strategy seems a lot like the way Microsoft captured the browser space by tying Windows and IE browser together and then the instant messenger market by tying Outlook Express and MSN Messenger together.
Already Sun encourages you to download NetBeans by providing bundled
downloads and stuff. This new policy would mean that getting started
with NetBeans would be far easier than Eclipse or any of the alternatives.
Don’t get me wrong. I like NetBeans a lot and I
think it is maturing very well. However I don’t think tying it to
Java is the way forward.
Related Links: Eclipse vs NetBeans
Reference: Sun To Tighten NetBeans 4.1 and Java in 2005
Would things really have been better if Sun too had taken the Eclipse route?
I think the increased competition and wish to make the better IDE makes both teams do better at a faster pace.
[URL=http://onkarjoshi.wordpress.com/]Onkar Joshi[/URL].
i think this whole forking thing actually contributes nothing to the development of j2ee/java technology….
if both teams worked on the same project, we’d probably have an world class ide by this very moment.
i strongly believe m$ past success with vb was in great depth due to the fact that visual studio was THE killer ide at that time.
visual studio .Net is not so utterly better than all others now, but it is clearly the best ide out there. i use and enjoy both netbeans and eclipse and i think that if the two teams joined forces we’d have a visual studio killer….. forking is so sad….
The J2SE download is bundled with NetBeans even if I dont want it. The download size goes up unneccesarily. After downloading the pack, there is no option to install only JDK. NetBeans also has to installed. Why is Sun doing this?
this already happened a few years ago
then it happened with their app server
what’s the big deal, just don’t use it if you don’t like it, its a service to newcomers and i think that is commendable
NetBeans is anyway a Java IDE so what’s the news if NetBeans is integrated with Java. So the announcement can only be the other way around.
We of course wouldn’t know for sure until Sun actually does something in this direction or provides a clarification.
I anyway think that providing the NetBeans bundled download of J2SE gives NetBeans an unfair advantage.
Although that sentence is in the first paragraph of the story, the story does not say anything about only distributing the JDK bundled with NetBeans, which is what you seem to imply they are planning.
‘Tying NetBeans and Java together’ is ambiguous. You’ve interpreted it to mean ‘tying Java to NetBeans,’ i.e., modifying Java (or at least the distribution of the JDK) so that NetBeans is unfairly favored, for example, by distributing the two as a bundle (which they’ve done for years) and not making the JDK available without NetBeans (which would be a new and nasty move). ‘Tying NetBeans to Java,’ which is what it sounds like Sun’s actually doing, makes sense, because NetBeans is a Java IDE, so, for example, if the JVM provides new and powerful hooks (that any IDE can use) for performance monitoring, NetBeans should leverage that.
Sounds like the author didn’t read past the first paragraph before being overcome by the impulse to stir up controversy, which is sad.
If Java was open source, atleast IBM could counter with IBM’s Java that is integrated with Eclipse. 🙂
The resultant would be chaos. I hope Sun doesn’t continue along this path.
I was starting to worry if Apache+PHP is killing good old Java and J2EE servers.