
Apache NetBeans Proposal - aikah
https://wiki.apache.org/incubator/NetBeansProposal
======
dr_faustus
Is it me or has Apache increasingly become the place open source projects of
big companies go to die? OpenOffice, Geronimo, Harmony, Wave, etc.pp.

I really think that Apache should stop incubating projects which were
essentially discarded by their corporate owners. Successful OSS projects are
either community projects from day one (HTTPd etc) or require (at least
initially) strong interest and involvement of the company that donates the
code. How can you expect a community to magically develop around an abandoned
project?

~~~
geodel
It is not you. If you look closely at Apache projects. They are mostly Java
type projects in various state of completion. Some are either failed at
corporates and hence dumped there (struts, cordova and so on) or too
experimental and hence good place get wider audience. If successful the main
sponsor will add proprietary features/components and sell product and/or
support(e.g Hadoop ecosystem components).

Some exceptions to this are Apache Http server, tomcat, svn etc.

~~~
_wmd
There are plenty of live and popular Apache projects that get plenty of press
time: Zookeeper, Hadooop, CouchDB, Cassandra, Storm, Cloudstack, SpamAssassin,
Lucene(! -- the guts of ElasticSearch), Spark, .. hell, the list is fairly
endless.

Yes they adopt a lot of code (OpenOffice!) and weird abstract crapware, but
this is not quite the norm. If you measure the success of the average Apache
project, I'm certain it is vastly higher than any comparable organization,
although I'm not sure who you could compare Apache to.. GNU?

~~~
geodel
Not much to disagree here. The success of Apache Http and Tomcat server will
itself lift average success rate by quite a bit. Others if successful are
mainly a vendor driven version of software.

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ognyankulev
The license will be changed to Apache License and this is great.

What I'm wondering is if they will succeed in keeping it very focused monolith
as it is now, or some "design by commitee" will make it buggy monstrosity like
Eclipse.

~~~
jcbeard
Exactly. I no longer use an IDE unless I have to (mostly a vim person), but if
I were to choose one I'd take Netbeans. It's always been the most "put
together". Easy to install, very focused, and the layout just makes sense.
Despite my preference of non-JVM for execution (mainly b/c I go for
performance vs. ease of coding), I like that Netbeans basically can run with
almost identical look and feel on almost any platform with a functional JVM. I
was always impressed that they were able to get the GUI to feel the same
cross-platform, which even on Java isn't always easy to do. I hope Netbeans is
able to keep its mojo intact. I was worried about the Oracle custodians...and
now we might have to worry about a committee which could be just as dangerous.

~~~
sdegutis
Have you ever used IntelliJ IDEA? It seems to meet all your requirements: it
looks and feels identical on all platforms with a JVM, it's very focused and
"put together", and the layout just makes sense. In fact I only mention this
after spending the last month trying out all three (Eclipse, NetBeans, IDEA)
and settling on IDEA for these reasons and a few more (especially how it
indexes the whole universe and gives you smart autocompletion in every place
imaginable). And the Community Edition is free, if price is a concern.

~~~
amyjess
Having used both NetBeans and IntellIJ, I greatly prefer NetBeans. What drove
me up the wall with IntelliJ was the poor Maven integration.

Maven projects are first-class citizens of NetBeans, which means that NetBeans
can read POM files as NetBeans project files. NetBeans generates a small
supplemental file (nbactions.xml) to cover the few project-related things the
POM doesn't store (such as the name of the default main class or the path to
the JVM), and it duplicates no information. IntelliJ, on the other hand, uses
its own project format exclusively, it duplicates everything, and the IntelliJ
project file regularly falls out of sync with the POM and has to be re-synced,
which can be a nightmare.

At the company where we used IntelliJ, I ended up just using IntelliJ as an
editor, and I did all my building by executing mvn on the command line (and
we, as a company-wide thing, never ran projects in IntelliJ: we had special
scripts for that). And the only reason I used IntelliJ there was because our
coding standards were defined as an IntelliJ config file; if not for that, I
would've just used NetBeans.

IntelliJ _might_ be a better editor than NetBeans, and that's debatable
because NetBeans is also a really good editor, but I simply cannot stand using
IntelliJ for anything other than editing, while NetBeans handles non-editing
tasks beautifully.

~~~
fithisux
"Having used both NetBeans and IntellIJ, I greatly prefer NetBeans"

Me too, even for C++. Wish it had Dlang integration too.

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marpstar
NetBeans was the first IDE we used in college (circa 2006). It's ridiculously
easy to get setup, as opposed to Eclipse which I've always disliked.

~~~
jitix
Me too. I think eclipse is too complicated for a college student who's just
upgrading from text editors or BlueJ. Netbeans is still my go-to IDE for
prototyping stuff or writing simple stuff that dont need me handling multiple
branches at once. The only reason its not my main IDE is the lack of
workspaces and/or multiple instances (I did make it work once but its too
tedious to set up again).

One of my favorite analogies is that Netbeans is the iOS of the IDEs and
Eclipse is the Android. Eclipse supports way fore features than Netbeans but
Netbeans "just works".

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satysin
I have always felt NetBeans lagged behind Eclipse (and Idea) under Sun and
even more so under Oracle. I think transferring to Apache would be a good
thing overall for the NetBeans project.

~~~
aikah
I personally enjoy NetBeans more than Eclipse or any other Java IDE. There is
something about Eclipse interface I just hate. But it always felt "less
pluggable" and harder to customize than other prominent IDE. But it looks like
it will definitely loose momentum without any real corporate support.

All in all, languages "shouldn't have IDE". They should provide services as
separate apps that should be pluggable and used in any editor. That's
something Go did well as it provides a code completion server and code quality
tools and any dev can make a plugin out of them for any editor.

It makes things easier to develop and maintain for service developers, plugin
developers and IDE developers.

I would love to be able to use Netbeans features without using Netbean itself,
without being tied to the IDE.

~~~
sjellis
There's actually now a common specification for language services (pioneered
by Microsoft for Visual Studio Code), and Red Hat are implementing it for
Eclipse:

[https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-
coden...](https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-codenvy-and-
microsoft-collaborate-language-server-protocol)

I don't whether anyone is working on this for Netbeans, though.

~~~
TylerJewell
Codenvy has added it into Che - shipping in a few weeks. Red Hat is adding it
into Eclipse. And IBM is adding it into Orion. There is collaboration from
Microsoft, Mulesoft, Salesforce, Zend, IBM, Red Hat and Typefox around the
language services and proposal.

The big piece that is missing is a language server registry so that any tool
can discover, install and register locally a language service. That will come
next.

~~~
chriswarbo
> The big piece that is missing is a language server registry so that any tool
> can discover, install and register locally a language service. That will
> come next.

According to the link:

> Language server registry: Language servers are published as part of a global
> registry, built by Codenvy as an Eclipse project and hosted by the Eclipse
> Foundation, to make language servers discoverable for any tool to consume.

Sounds pretty cool. It's certainly a sad state of affairs when we look at
existing projects like [http://editorconfig.org](http://editorconfig.org) and
see that it only really covers indentation; we programmers should be those
most able to configure and improve our own tools!

I really think there's a _lot_ of low-hanging fruit for improving the
programming workflow, and I think it begins by decoupling basic functionality
like this from the monolithic IDEs they've traditionally inhabited.

~~~
john-waterwood
We're able but we don't do it, since there's a 9 to 5 job with a manager that
always screams we work to slowly, and then after work we have to pick up kids,
do the dishes and what have you.

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dboreham
Time to buy some JetBrains stock..

~~~
reitanqild
Why?

If anything Netbeans should be more attractive if it is released from Oracle.

~~~
dragonwriter
> If anything Netbeans should be more attractive if it is released from
> Oracle.

Until the community around it solidifies and proves that it is committed and
capable, it will probably be _less_ attractive than when it was backed by
Oracle.

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heisenbit
The license changing to Apache is probably a good thing in the long run. The
committer list in the proposal is roughly 1/3 Oracle. One can only hope they
continue to be committed to it. It is certainly an ominous sign for the Java
community in general that the designated steward is divesting tooling.

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ysleepy
I think Oracle is disappointed how their ownership of Java is not as powerful
as hoped though costing them a lot. The tooling and enterprise workflow
probably eats a lot of manpower.

Netbeans was always great for the more advanced Java platform features since
it was "officially" supported and often the demo implementation for them.

I hope Oracle will continue invest in it because it is a polished platform.
The profiling and sampling tools shared with visualvm are awesome.

Or maybe Oracle is just loosening the governance grip on the platform allowing
some control for other organisations invested in the platform.

Time will tell.

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gliesian
I like NetBeans and I like Apache
[http://robertjliguori.blogspot.com/2016/09/apache-
netbeans-w...](http://robertjliguori.blogspot.com/2016/09/apache-netbeans-
where-only-good-gets.html)

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gliesian
I like NetBeans [http://robertjliguori.blogspot.com/2016/09/apache-
netbeans-w...](http://robertjliguori.blogspot.com/2016/09/apache-netbeans-
where-only-good-gets.html)

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nickserv
Good news overall, at least with Apache the project stands a chance of
continuing. Oracle has shown to be a poor manager of open-source projects.

Maybe we can even get a proper Python plugin out of this ;-)

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thrillgore
This worked out well for OpenOffice.org, Cassandra, Wave, Groovy...

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chris_wot
Oracle transfers their software to the Apache Foundation: what could
_possibly_ go wrong?

~~~
bonoboTP
What are you referring to?

~~~
akuchling
Surely to Apache OpenOffice, which hasn't yet built a strong development
community under the ASF's umbrella.

~~~
peterkelly
"Yet". I'm sure it will... just give it more time

~~~
davidgerard
How much are you thinking? That is, at what point is your claim testable?

