Interesting perspective on NetBeans

Dana Gardner recently did a post on ‘NetBeans maybe a hedge for ISVs…’. His post was based on a briefing he had with the NetBean’s folk. In the past, I have enjoyed a lot of Dana’s analysis but this post needs a bit of discussion.

I think the general thesis of his blog is that ‘if you want to develop in Java you have to use NetBeans.’ For me I just don’t see this as being true. The statement:

if you’re an Eclipse shop, to make sure you have a handle on NetBeans to ensure that you have an end-to-end Java strength (as that becomes finally possible) and while IBM walks away from Java on the client?

I just don’t see what part of end-to-end Java Eclipse doesn’t support? We support Swing, J2EE, EJB 3, Nokia is starting a J2ME project, etc. Also, I don’t see anyone walking away from Java on the client. At Eclipse we have a lot of people using Eclipse RCP to build end user applications for the desktop. I certainly don’t speak for IBM but in my mind their Workplace announcements are a strong endorsement of Java on the desktop; not walking away.

The next statement also touches upon the Eclipse support of different clients:

that need to hedge their bets by being able to move on a dime regardless of how the world plays out — fat client, rich client, thin client, no client — is NetBeans a risk reducer?

I think we have support for all of these. Fat client = Eclipse RCP with no update manager connectivity; Rich Client = Eclipse RCP (and it rocks ); thin client = check out the new proposal for AJAX tools; no client = Eclipse WTP. Not sure how NetBeans reduces the risk? In fact, I would add embedded clients, parallel computers, etc. I agree the world is a complex set of deployment targets, if you ask me Eclipse has a much wider support.

Another part of Dana’s blog has me thinking:

Is the common denominator of Java to NetBeans a strategic advantage that no one but Sun can manage and extend, and which is neither controlled by Microsoft nor IBM?

For me the strength of Java is the community. I believe Eclipse is an important part of the Java community and I like to think we add a lot of value. Lots of organizations are pushing forward the Java community, not just Sun. For everyone’s sake, I certainly hope this continues to be true.

The one thing I agree is that the SWT and Swing discussion misses the point. Lots of Eclipse users build Swing applications. I think this is great. They have chosen the technology that best meets their needs. SWT is an alternative technology that other people like and meets their needs. Choice is good. No?

So I really don’t see the hedge. The good news is that we have hundreds of ISVs that are happy members of the Eclipse community and we keep on growing. I don’t see anyone hedging.

Eclipse Review

Alan Zeichick, editor-in-chief of SD Times and BZ Media, did us the honour of visiting us in frigid Ottawa. Alan and the gang at BZ Media are preparing the launch of the Eclipse Review magazine. The first edition is set for EclispeCon.

Alan was kind enough to share with us their plans for the magazine. I was really pleased with what I saw. It is going to be a developer oriented magazine written by developers. Lots of code, tips and tricks. I think it will be a great addition to the Eclipse community.

btw, you can sign-up for a free subscription here.

Cool Open Source Java Proposals at OSCON

Daniel Steingberg from onJava is looking for some cool open source Java projects to put in proposals at OSCON. Seems like the Harmony and Eclipse proposals are a tad boring; at least to Ruby and Perl folks. Hmmm, those sound like fighting words .

Seriously, I think there is a lot of cool stuff going on around Eclipse. Scott how about a proposal on ECF; Paul and Mary what about Higgins; the BIRT guys are doing some cool stuff around reporting and it definitely seems by this summer John Graham and the Data Tools project will be making it a lot easier to build data centric appplications. Of course I think Eclipse RCP is cool, so I’d hope we get a proposal in for that too. Now we could start talking about all the cool things outside of Java; how about parellel development in Fortran; tooling framework for AJAX, etc.

I know I have missed a lot of other things and just reviewing all the submissiosn to EclipseCon, I know there is a lot of content out there. If you are interested, send in a proposal to speak at OSCON.

Daniel, I am sure we can find something that will fit your program.

New Eclipse BIRT 2.0

Congratulations to the BIRT team for their new 2.0 release. We just issued a press release to highlight this fact, so I hope to see some good coverage for BIRT this week. You can also check out the new and noteworthy here.

Two things that really sitck out for me about this release: 1) we are starting to see momentum of vendors starting to incorporate BIRT into their commercial products. Actuate, IBM, Pentaho, Zend and Scapa are mentioned in the press release. 2) the BIRT team is really focused on creating a reporting ecosystem. The new feature in 2.0 for creating report templates and the extensibility of the base frameworks will be important for making this a reality.

btw, check out the new BIRT article on EclipseZone by John Ward of Citibank. Great to see users starting to write articles.

RCP for server applications

Wolfgang Gehner from Infonoia has posted an interesting article about using RCP/Equinox for server side applications. There are also discussion threads about the article on EclipseZone and The ServerSide.

There seems to be a lot of innovation developing around RCP and Equinox. This is a great example and it will be interesting to see how it develops. Developing server side applications using Eclipse is definitely an exciting idea.

btw, notice Wolfgang is based in Switzerland. I am telling you, Germany and Switzerland are hot beds for RCP.

Oracle and Eclipse

Last week, Sun and Oracle made a big partnership announcement. Part of the announcement contained a reference to Oracle and NetBeans; but no specifics. Oracle is a great supporter of Eclipse, leading 3 projects, so this announcement got my attention.

Therefore, I was happy to see Omar Tazi reference an interview with Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s Senior Vice President for Oracle Fusion Middleware, that clarifies Oracle’s position:

“…But as of right now, Oracle is focused on JDeveloper and Eclipse and we have no plans to adopt either NetBeans or any of its technology. Any statements to the contrary by anyone else in the industry are not true.”

It is great to see this clarification.

ERP, CRM and Business Components on RCP

Last year at Eclipse World, Patrick Kerpin, at the time CTO of Borland, did a great keynote presentation; part of which touch upon of his criteria for the success of RCP. He wanted to see the open source community to start building higher value components, ex. ERP and CRM system, based on Eclipse RCP.

Well I’m not ready to declare victory but in the last couple of weeks I’ve been sent links to two interesting open source projects that are based on RCP. OpenJades is focused on business components and the relatively new JFire is focused on ERP and CRM.

Interesting thing, they both seem to be out of Germany. I really think Germany and Switzerland are a hot bed for RCP. Not sure why but it is great to see.

btw, feel free to send in more pointers to other open source projects based on RCP. I will post them here.

Participant for an EclipseCon Panel

I am helping to organize an EclipseCon panel called ‘Enterprise Ready: Deploying Eclipse in a large enterprise‘. This panel is part of the business track and the focus is on the management and technical aspects of deploying Eclipse into a large enterprise.

If you know of someone that would be interested in participating in this panel, please send me an e-mail (ian dot skerrett at eclipse dot org). Ideally the participant will be from a large enterprise (banks, insurance companies, government, pharmaceuticals, etc) that has hundreds of developers using Eclipse (or an Eclipse based product) for internal development.

Current Nominations for Eclipse Awards

I have created a web site that shows the current list of nominations for the Eclipse Technology Awards. There is still lots of time to nominate your product. Deadline for nominations is January 27, 2006.

JBoss Poll on IDEs

In the most recent JBoss newsletter they published the result of a poll they did of their user based, asking what is your favourite IDE. Eclipse comes in at 58% and if you combine MyEclipse it pushes the total to 67%. This reaffirms the trend I have noticed in surveys of java developers, Eclipse is usually used by about 55-65%.

Here are the results of last month’s poll that asked: What is your favorite IDE?

• Eclipse – 58%
• MyEclipse – 9%
• Netbeans – 12%
• Sun Java Studio Creator – 1%
• Borland JBuilder – 5%
• IntelliJ IDEA – 12%
• General Text Editor – 1%
• Other – 3%