Why Oracle Should Continue To Push NetBeans 📎
Oracle pushes JDeveloper and Sun NetBeans. Because Oracle is about to buy Sun, only one of the IDEs will be officially supported in long term. From strategic point of view, NetBeans would be the better choice:
- Footprint: Netbeans 6.7.1 download (with Java EE support and 2 Glassfish versions) is 158 MB big. JDeveloper comes with about 1 GB. The initial footprint is really important for adoption.
- Adoption: Netbeans became very popular. In this poll, from 2,753 voters, 1,191 voted for NetBeans, 1,340 for Eclipse, but only 39 for JDeveloper (plain text editor got 103 votes :-)). Also regarding to Google Trends, NetBeans seems to be far more popular, than JDeveloper.
- Java FX: NetBeans has already Java FX support (at least a start). Larry Ellison officially committed to Java FX during the Java One 2009 conference.
- Visual Design: NetBeans comes with advanced Swing / UI / DataBinding / DataBase capabilities. It is based on JSR-296 and 295, but could be extended with e.g. Better Beans Binding.
- Reporting: iReport, the reporting tool for JasperReport is based on Netbeans.
- MySql / Oracle Support: NetBeans comes with good Oracle / MySql support out of the box. It isn't as good as Oracle's SQL Developer - but could be easily extended, or even replace by SQL Developer functionality.
- DTrace Support: NetBeans has already DTrace support. This, however, is only relevant, in case Oracle will keep supporting and developing Solaris.
- Glassfish / BEA Support: NetBeans is well integrated with BEA, even better with Glassfish.
Both, JDeveloper and Netbeans, are Swing based and modular. JDeveloper was originally based on JBuilder and prime time (a plugin system). So it shouldn't be a big deal to move existing functionality from JDeveloper into NetBeans.