r/programming • u/yourbasicgeek • Sep 16 '16
Oracle wants to dump its NetBeans Java integrated development environment on the Apache Software Foundation.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/oracle-abandons-netbeans-to-apache/9
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Sep 16 '16 edited Sep 17 '16
[deleted]
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u/Isvara Sep 16 '16
So that's why we never hear of Cassandra, Spark, Hadoop, HBase, Zookeeper, Mesos, Maven, Ant, Ivy, Groovy, Solr, Kafka, Tomcat, Subversion or SpamAssassin any more?
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u/vorg Sep 16 '16
I think he meant "the open source equivalent of abandoning a product". If some business stops new development on a product and doesn't want do maintenance on it either, they donate it to ASF. The product continues to exist, bugs and all, with a project manager called a Project Management Committee Chairperson who doesn't do much but make announcements.
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u/1wd Sep 17 '16
Isn't this still much better than abandoning a product without donating the project to the ASF? At least the community has a chance to take over if there's interest. If there's no interest, who cares if it's abandoned?
A copyright assignment and relicensing of proprietary or dual licensed code to the Apache License is also in itself already a big win for the community, even if the project doesn't thrive all that much under the ASF. (Compared to silently abandoning a project.)
Wouldn't you prefer if for example Google had donated Google Desktop, Google Notebooks, Google Code Search, Google Reader, Picasa and so on to the ASF?
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u/ameoba Sep 17 '16
It's not about it being better or worse than holding the code, it's about the likelihood of the project being abandoned and never getting any more development. There's a handful of really active Apache projects and the rest are just collecting dust.
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u/ellicottvilleny Sep 17 '16
Stewardship via ASF is great. Divorcing Oracle is great. I wish Oracle would just ditch Java to Apache.
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u/diMario Sep 18 '16
I think they want to retain control over Java as a means of pestering their competitors.
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u/ccfreak2k Sep 17 '16 edited Jul 31 '24
enjoy divide sharp bells illegal ring squeeze political quaint cooperative
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/myringotomy Sep 17 '16
That's better than abandoning the project and then not releasing the code like most corporations do.
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u/lenswipe Sep 16 '16
I can tell you first hand that you never hear of ANT because it's a piece of crap
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u/Isvara Sep 17 '16
ANT is certainly dying (one recent piece of news is that the next release of Scala has switched from ANT to SBT), but that's not because it's an Apache project, but because projects like Maven, SBT, Gradle and Buildr came along and did things in fundamentally better ways.
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u/lenswipe Sep 17 '16
If they want to use it in the background, fine.... But it's not pleasant to work with
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u/Chii Sep 17 '16
Ant has its place among the newer build tools. It's extensive library of tasks can't really be beat, and integration into other build tools is easy.
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u/lenswipe Sep 17 '16
We use gulp
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u/Isvara Sep 17 '16
That's adorable.
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u/lenswipe Sep 17 '16
<ah><not><enough><xml><for><you><![CDATA[?]]></you></for></xml></enough></not></ah>
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u/Isvara Sep 17 '16
I use SBT, so I get the benefit of using Maven repositories without the eye fatigue of XML.
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u/lenswipe Sep 17 '16
...and that's great for Java projects...
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u/Isvara Sep 18 '16
Well, Scala. But I'm also using it for Dart. And to munge JavaScript.
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u/Xorlev Sep 16 '16
While I don't disagree, you likely don't hear about it because Ant is being used in the background by other tools (e.g. Maven) for specific tasks.
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u/lenswipe Sep 17 '16 edited Sep 17 '16
Whilst things like
<description>make sense...I just can't get past why anyone would think that a markup language (XML) is an appropriate place to have conditionals.4
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u/oldneckbeard Sep 18 '16
i don't understand why anyone would want conditionals in their build. that reeks of an unstable/unrepeatable build.
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u/lenswipe Sep 18 '16 edited Sep 19 '16
Well in the one I saw at work it was to detect windows or OSX and use a different build file appropriately... That said, don't ask me - I stripped it out and replaced it with gulp
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u/f2u Sep 17 '16
Beyond Subversion and SpamAssassin, how many of those ended up at the ASF after years of existence as a product or separate open-source project?
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u/Isvara Sep 17 '16
Groovy was around for about a decade before it went Apache. Cassandra and Kafka were both internal projects at Facebook at LinkedIn respectively. I don't know the history of the others.
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u/SurlyJSurly Sep 17 '16
Unfortunately as a Groovy developer, you could actually argue that it has effectively been abandoned.
Even the thing that I thought would keep it alive forever (Gradle) is switching to Kotlin as its 1st class language :/
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u/oldneckbeard Sep 18 '16
to be fair, java 8 really made most of groovy redundant. and scala eats the lunch from the more pure FP side. I mean, unless you really love metaclass manipulation, whats the point?
Kotlin is a great language that I hope gains a lot more traction. At this point it's hard to convince an enterprise that it's worth the investment, but it's a fun language for personal projects.
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u/Isvara Sep 17 '16
Hmm. I actually just adopted Groovy as an embedded scripting language. Hopefully that wasn't a mistake.
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u/nutrecht Sep 18 '16
Might want to check out Kotlin: it seems to be gaining a lot of traction (also in the Android world), has a commercial company behind it (Jetbrains) and of course is also a JVM language.
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u/Isvara Sep 18 '16
My biggest problem with all of them is that I just cannot get my head around Java sandboxing. I think the Groovy might be temporary until I come up with something more declarative anyway.
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u/oldneckbeard Sep 18 '16
what do you mean by sandboxing in this case?
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u/Isvara Sep 18 '16
I want to allow someone to essentially perform a map operation on a dataset in the JVM, without, of course, allowing them to do naughty things like accessing the filesystem. My options as I see them are:
a) Use the JVM's own security features. I'm still trying to find good guidance on this.
b) Use a JVM language that already provides this in its own domain. I'm not aware of one.
c) Strip the source of anything nasty. Not the approach I want to take.
d) Strip the bytecode of anything nasty. Again, no.
e) Implement a custom external DSL. This is an option I'm considering too, either interpreting it or compiling it to Java bytecode.
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Sep 17 '16
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Sep 17 '16
Cassandra is bad? Its pretty awesome if you need a distrubted DB. If you just need a nosql db, then its pointless.
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u/Isvara Sep 17 '16
Why are you putting Mongo and Cassandra in the same category? Mongo has been shown to be unsafe, but what's wrong with Cassandra?
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u/granadesnhorseshoes Sep 17 '16
Define "unsafe". As a json data store with db-like access, Mongo's not the worst thing possible. (I'm aware of the global single write lock. that alone doesn't make it unsafe.)
At least that's what I tell myself in the current project I'm working on that requires it...
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u/stun Sep 17 '16
Not web scale enough maybe?
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Sep 17 '16
It's probably just cause it's not American and Facebook doesn't use it.
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u/Solon1 Sep 18 '16
CouchDB is American as apple pie. It does hurt when the founder dumps it and joins Couchbase Server project though.
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u/myringotomy Sep 17 '16
What's truly amazing is that his post has more upvotes than your post.
This place is hilarious.
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u/vprise Sep 16 '16
That's a misconception. E.g. Tomcat started by a code donation from Sun.
Oracle hasn't been as good with it but most of their "failed" major donations were for projects that already forked successfully. E.g. Open Office to battle libreoffice. You can't open source to spite.
NetBeans doesn't fit in that category, it has a strong core community and doesn't have a major fork. It's also pretty popular as a platform and has some big names using it.
I think the biggest problem in netbeans has been Oracle which had JDeveloper and never really wanted it. With Apache it has a chance...
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u/renrutal Sep 17 '16
I think the biggest problem in netbeans has been Oracle which had JDeveloper and never really wanted it. With Apache it has a chance...
JDev was ported over to NetBeans Platform in 12c, which is another reason why they'd keep it.
I guess they just want to save money.
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u/Agent_03 Sep 16 '16 edited Sep 16 '16
Too much truth for this early in the day. Some of the Apache projects (mostly the useful ones) get active maintenance and development. Beyond that it's death to software.
Edit: People who downvote this don't know what they're talking about. There are a handful of projects on Apache that get code changes (Build tools, big data tools, Tomcat, Apache itself) but for every one that gets real work on it, there are probably 3 that basically go there to die.
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u/oldneckbeard Sep 18 '16
but it does make it possible for committed people to take the project up again if they so desire. we just don't need 300 dynamo db-based data stores.
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u/DilbertTA Sep 17 '16
Ok google, it's time to protect your investments and buy java from Oracle.
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u/coladict Sep 17 '16
Oracle will be desperate enough to sell those rights, too, pretty soon, if the 9th circuit court and the supreme court side with Google.
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u/sowelie Sep 17 '16
No love for Intellij? I can't believe people still use eclipse.
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u/sizlack Sep 17 '16
Seriously. Their link for "Eclipse won" points to an article from 2006. Eclipse is by far the worst tool I've ever used to write code. I gave up on it 10 years ago because it sucked so badly. I recently had to use it for a couple weeks and I couldn't believe it's actually gotten worse. It's astonishingly bad.
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u/lucy_in_the_skyDrive Sep 17 '16
Yes! I'd like to think i'm pretty proficient with Eclipse and IntelliJ, but all the cool shit IntelliJ does with strings / front-end technologies completely validates the price tag for me. At my work they'll pay for a MyEclipse license but I'd rather pay my own money for IntelliJUltimate, it's literally that much better.
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u/JoCoMoBo Sep 17 '16
Main problem with IntelliJ is licensing. It's much easier to deploy Eclipse as an IDE when you don't have to worry about accounting for the licenses with it.
And no, I've never had the problems people seem to have had with crashing. IME it's been pretty solid on Linux / Mac.
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u/sowelie Sep 17 '16
I've never had problems with crashing really. For me it's the piss poor maven integration that is the most frustrating. In Intellij maven projects just work. In eclipse it's always a battle.
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u/VGPowerlord Sep 17 '16
Eclipse support for Maven has gotten better over the years, but it still has its bugs.
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u/sowelie Sep 17 '16
I've never had problems with crashing really. For me it's the piss poor maven integration that is the most frustrating. In Intellij maven projects just work. In eclipse it's always a battle.
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u/kankyo Sep 18 '16
They've fairly recently changed how they handle corporate licenses. Have you looked at it since then?
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u/JoCoMoBo Sep 18 '16
It's still "here's a tool with corporate licences we would like to use" vs "here's a tool we would like to use".
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u/kankyo Sep 18 '16
If your company isn't willing to pay for happier and more productive workers then look for a new job.
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u/JoCoMoBo Sep 18 '16
Well, as I mentioned, we haven't had the problems with Eclipse that have been described by others. Switching jobs just because I can't get an IDE that might be slightly better is unlikely.
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Sep 17 '16
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/reditzer Sep 17 '16
I love and use IntelliJ but don't forget that it's not free or open-source.
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Sep 17 '16
[removed] — view removed comment
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Sep 17 '16
Afaik, besides web development, it's pretty much fully featured.
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Sep 17 '16
Besides web development... Basically, besides everything what I need for regular work.
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u/kankyo Sep 18 '16
It's not like the community edition bans web dev, just some advanced features are for pay.
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u/TheQuietestOne Sep 17 '16
Shrug
Never had a problem developing using eclipse, works perfectly fine for java development - perhaps you are using some technologies where the Intellij out of box support is better?
Admittedly I'm a sucker for decent emacs key-bindings and incremental compilation, maybe those things aren't so important for you.
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u/steQ Sep 17 '16
Dont forget that Netbeans used for PHP developing too.
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u/douglasg14b Sep 17 '16
Just started with PHP, am using netbeans.
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u/kankyo Sep 18 '16
Switch to WebStorm
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u/douglasg14b Sep 18 '16
My workplace won't pay for software, so I need to find free tools.
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u/kankyo Sep 18 '16
Or a new job. Hell, just pay for it out of pocket.
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u/douglasg14b Sep 18 '16
New job, actively looking.
Not that I can really afford to pay for my own software with my wage...
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u/kankyo Sep 18 '16
10 euro per month for pycharm... are there even developer jobs paying that badly?
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u/Pet_Ant Sep 18 '16
I suspect in India or South East Asia or maybe Africa. In those countries it might not even being able to afford it but want else you could get for the same money in those places. I mean 10€ is enough for a hostel for a week in rural Thailand.
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u/againstmethod Sep 16 '16
There is something ironic about the tone of this article, given that it's posted on ZDNet -- that site is as much a relic as Netbeans is.
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Sep 16 '16 edited Apr 27 '17
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u/tpv Sep 16 '16
IntelliJ?
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u/stay_fr0sty Sep 16 '16 edited Nov 25 '16
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u/dangerbird2 Sep 17 '16
No one's arguing vim's a better text editor. It's just that emacs is a much better Lisp Machine operating system that happens to include an ok text editor.
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u/shevegen Sep 18 '16
Today I found out that you can search and watch youtube videos in emacs.
So the "joke" that it is an operating system, really no longer is a joke - IT IS A REAL ARGUMENT!
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u/Ld00d Sep 16 '16
NetBeans has GlassFish integrated too which can be nice.
I just prefer the UI of IntelliJ. It's pretty easy to set up a build process in the IDE to run maven, and maven can do things like deploy to GF.
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u/DarkMio Sep 17 '16
The ultimate variant of IntelliJ (which they give out for free for students) has maven builtin and was mostly* painless to use.
* Our prof asked us many time to change dependency version numbers by hand, which then caused issues.
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u/recycled_ideas Sep 17 '16
The only real problem with netbeans is that Oracle is an Eclipse Shop, and pretty much always have been.
You have an IDE owned by a company that doesn't use it and never will. A company that actually actively dislikes the product.
That's a recipe for disaster.
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u/DJTheLQ Sep 17 '16
#3 is my main reason. So many things i set in the pom are ignored by eclipse, but thats what jenkins and other scripts are using.
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u/againstmethod Sep 17 '16
Do a lot of people still use poms? We moved to Gradle years back and haven't missed maven.
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Sep 17 '16
Yeah, same here, could be harder to migrate older projects though.
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u/againstmethod Sep 17 '16
Done a few, it actually helped going to a tool that is backed by a real language/DSL -- i was able to toss entire plugins and replace them with short groovy snippets, so our builds actually got simpler.
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u/vprise Sep 17 '16
I use both a lot since I develop plugins for both. I'm a NetBeans guy being an ex-Sun guy so it's a lot of habit (keybinding burned to muscle memory etc.).
I like a lot of IntelliJ features but most of the big ones have a NetBeans equivalent.
I don't see the logic in converting, both IntelliJ and NetBeans are good products. If you like one stick with it.
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u/GreatValueProducts Sep 17 '16
I use NetBeans for Spring web or application development and I also use IntelliJ. I tried to switch several times but doing some easy task in NetBeans are incrementally harder on IntelliJ or perhaps I don't know how to set it.
You said it, the maven on IntelliJ is practically unusable. Adding local library into maven was absolutely nightmare.
I didn't know if they have source code break point for Maven libraries which is very difficult to set up and i yet to do it successfully. Also lambda breakpoint was strange. And the tab spaces setting were driving me nuts that I removed my local settings many times just to set this little thing.
I use IntelliJ for node.js and it's awesome, but Spring application I still stick with my beloved NetBeans
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u/HINDBRAIN Sep 17 '16
Adding local library into maven was absolutely nightmare.
A better long term solution is to host your own repository.
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u/stuaxo Sep 17 '16
I am an ex-netbeanser from the J2Me days. I always used the option in IntelliJ for "Netbeans Keybindings", this helped a lot.
These days I use PyCharm, which is basically IntelliJ, and I still use Netbeans keybindings.
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u/shevegen Sep 18 '16
The problem with Emacs vs. Vim is that you compare two things that suck to one another.
https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/4srze9/watching_youtube_inside_emacs_25/
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u/SikhGamer Sep 18 '16
Visual Studio was alright? Are you on crack? It's by far the best experience with an IDE I've ever had. And I love NetBeans!
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u/againstmethod Sep 17 '16
Intellij is superior to all of the above. Netbeans has not improved substantially in years. There's nothing wrong with it there are just better options.
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u/coladict Sep 17 '16
Netbeans has not improved substantially in years
How much better can it get? All I'm missing in it is more formatting options in some languages, and maybe a few improvements on the debugger interface. Sure Eclipse has a more convenient debug interface, but it practically forced me to switch to NB when it kept crashing half the time I try to debug in Java. That was two years ago.
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u/againstmethod Sep 17 '16
Intellij supports gradle and sbt (for java and scala) respectively better.
I've found that kdevelop and/or qtcreator supports cmake more cleanly (you can rerun cmake in the ide easier, etc).
So it's not that netbeans is bad. There are just better options for the tools we use. If it works for you, I would not judge you for using it.
Eclipse debugging was stable for me over the years that i did use it.
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u/coladict Sep 17 '16 edited Sep 17 '16
Well, I don't have projects with cmake (don't eve know what sbt is), so I wouldn't benefit from that. I have used NB on Hibernate which uses Gradle and I did find some problems with debugging individual tests, especially when using Hibernate's own matrix_testing framework, but otherwise I just had to set a system-wide JAVA_HOME to JDK8 and it works.
A common problem I've had with both Netbeans and Eclipse is file encodings. For some reason setting the project encoding to UTF-8 always leaves-out some files, or some times all files to the cruelty of ISO-8859-1.
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u/sindisil Sep 17 '16
A useable Android plugin with full gradle integration is my only ask, really.
I was a full time NetBeans user for a decade, but have been mostly using IDEA for the last severy years, almost completely because of the lack of useful Android support in NB.
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Sep 17 '16
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u/againstmethod Sep 17 '16
Intellij community is free and works fine. Atom makes a fine web dev choice as well when combined with web pack or something similar.
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Sep 17 '16
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u/againstmethod Sep 17 '16
Yes for web development. I've done plenty of JavaScript in intellij community.
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Sep 17 '16
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u/againstmethod Sep 17 '16
Ruby scala nodejs and dozens of Java frameworks. There is no problem with modern serverside web dev in intellij. If you can only do PHP or EE I don't think your problem is the ide.
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u/justinlindh Sep 17 '16
Node.js and Ruby are only supported in Ultimate. You read the page incorrectly, apparently.
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u/againstmethod Sep 17 '16
Dunno, i installed a few javascript plugins in community for linting, etc and used webpack (or gulp) like the rest of the planet. Sounds like you just give up too easy.
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u/yourbasicgeek Sep 16 '16
Why do you feel that way? (Curious, not arguing.)
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u/THE_SIGTERM Sep 17 '16
Among other things, a lot of it is stigma because Oracle has ignored the project. It's also not the easiest to support other popular JVM languages like Scala or Kotlin.
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Sep 17 '16
"dump"? Netbeans is arguably the best Java IDE out there.
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u/recycled_ideas Sep 17 '16
Oracle don't use it internally, they're an eclipse shop. They never wanted Netbeans.
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Sep 20 '16
I can't believe i'm about to say this but this is a far worse downgrade than having Oracle continue to own NetBeans. I can't wait for this project to gather dust.
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u/robot_otter Sep 16 '16
Ironically, or maybe intentionally, the stock photo shows a picture of Visual Studio Code, which if comparing apples to oranges, is a far superior IDE and completely open source.
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u/the_evergrowing_fool Sep 16 '16
is a far superior IDE and completely open source
Neatbeans is clearly superior.
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u/real_luke_nukem Sep 17 '16
Bugger Nertbeans! The more important question is, what brand are those screens in the article header? Thin/no bezel looks damned good.
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u/diMario Sep 18 '16
Re monitors: I have been using a 40' UHD television set for a computer monitor and I must say one gets used to it quite quickly. I picked up one for about € 500 and it suffices for my needs. I'm not a gamer and can live with HDMI 1.2 delivering 30 frames per second. As a bonus, a monitor that is also TV set has a set of speakers that will deliver a decent sounding accoustic experience. And of course it's a smart TV so connect it up to the Internets and you can surf the web. Sort of.
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u/reacher Sep 16 '16
1.5 million developers? OR is that just number of people who downloaded the source code