Java Magazine, Nov/Dec 2016

ORACLE COM JAVAMAGAZINE NOVEMBER DECEMBER 2016 04 from the editor based GUI development tool called Matisse Thats a lot of quality to come from what was originally a student project at Charles University in Prague The core development team for NetBeans has remained primarily based in Prague although marketing and other functions have been based at various times in the United States and elsewhere Eventually NetBeans was acquired by Sun where it was open sourced And through the 2011 acquisition of Sun NetBeans became part of Oracle At that point I was quite surprised to read of Oracles commitment to continue developing NetBeans After all the company already offered JDeveloper for free and sponsored Oracle specific packages and extensions for Eclipse But actually Oracle did more than just commit to supporting the platforms development and promotion it also began using portions of NetBeans in its own products specifically JDeveloper and VisualVM and eventually a variety of other development tools For this reason even with the move to the ASF NetBeans has secured a commitment from Oracle to underwrite its development for two more releases the upcoming 8 x version and the 90 release If you were to view NetBeans purely as a programming environment its fate after Oracles commitment expires would be most uncertain Although many projects under the ASF aegis have flourished Maven Hadoop Spark and others more than a few projects have migrated to the ASF only to die there See the Apache Attic for a list of defunct projects However over the years NetBeans evolved from an IDE into a platform consisting of large scale components that can be assembled in different ways to form desktop applications This architecture uses a rather different approach than Eclipses OSGi based system of modules and bundles This page compares the Eclipse and NetBeans architectures Numerous companies including Oracle have exploited the benefits of NetBeans architecture and built applications whose runtime includes the platform components These companies have an interest in continuing the forward direction of NetBeans and some have committed to work on NetBeans in its new home I expect but obviously I dont know that they will contribute either directly or by engaging NetBeans current cohort of developers to continue developing the platform In addition the community of users many of whom are truly dedicated to NetBeans might well step up and begin contributing Its difficult to project the extent of participation because very few projects with so large a user base have been migrated to the ASF and so there is little history to provide guidance For users of NetBeans though nothing need be done for now or in the near term The 90 release is scheduled for August 2017 and will cover Java 9 By that time we will surely have more insight into the transition of NetBeans the level of activity and the level of support from both commercial users and the developer community Andrew Binstock Editor in Chief javamag_ us@ oracle com @ platypusguy Level Up at Oracle Code Step up to modern cloud development At the Oracle Code roadshow expert developers lead labs and sessions on PaaS Java mobile and more Get on the list for event updates go oracle com oraclecoderoadshow developer oracle com developersrule