Netbeans 6 Dual-Licensed Under GPLv2, CDDL

Lally Singh writes "Interested in the new Netbeans 6, but didn't trust Sun's (already OSI-approved) CDDL? Sun just Dual-Licensed it under the GPL (v2) with Classpath Exception. Keep your karmic license purity and mix in all the (now compatible) GPL code you want. If you've been using Eclipse, Netbeans 6 is really worth a look. Lean, well-featured, and fast."

Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried it, but it still runs like ass. It's sad that a great platform like Java has such a bad rep because of one toolkit (Swing).

I'm developing an app in Java, using the JOGL opengl bindings and it performs fantastically. Netbeans, on the other hand, runs like I have it on a 486, not a quad core Q6600 Intel processor.

I don't know how people compare Netbeans to Eclipse, actually feels native (because it IS native) and runs snappy as hell. Not only that, but Eclipse is great for python, javascript, c/c++ and many, many other non-java technologies.

Re:Tried it

[Lally Singh]

This was NS 6? Both it and Eclipse take a bit to start up (A 2GB Macbook Pro), but NB doesn't lag as badly as Eclipse when I use it.

I've been using Eclipse for some time, but it's been getting on my nerves with speed/crash-happiness/bugginess. NB's treating me better these days.

OTOH, maybe Eclipse is *really* focusing on the Win32 experience, and the Mac experience is just crappy?

Re:Tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

It's sad that a great platform like Java has such a bad rep because of one toolkit (Swing).

ORLY? It isn't its closed nature, its incredible slowness in all real-world tests, its poorly designed libraries, its tacked on generics, its amazingly lame fake closure support (anonymous classes), its lack of useful type safety (there's more to type safety than objects), its complete lack of delegates, its overly strict file structure requirements,...

I don't know how people compare Netbeans to Eclipse, actually feels native (because it IS native) and runs snappy as hell.

LoL, have you ever actually used Eclipse? I have (thanks, idiots who chose J2EE), and I have to tell you, I've never used a slower application. I'll Alt-Tab over from Outlook and then wait literally a minute for it to wake up and allow the native widgets to render. Thanks to the brain-dead "continuous compile" feature, it's the only application I've ever used that makes media players skip on a DUAL CORE machine.

Seriously, Eclipse is nigh unusable on a 2GHz dual core machine with 1GB of RAM. I suppose a quad core might make it "snappy" but on more "normal" hardware it runs worse than any program I've ever used. It's also one of the few Java programs I've used that manages to crash the virtual machine on a consistent basis.

Of course, since it's Java, it's always possible for Netbeans to be worse, so you could be right that Eclipse is "snappy" compared to Netbeans, but even WITH native widgets, Eclipse is one of the least responsive, slowest, crappiest IDEs I've ever had the misfortune of being forced to use.

it's the best Ruby IDE there is

[crayz]

The Netbeans 6 dev/beta releases have been quickly becoming the best Ruby/Rails IDE, bar none. Used to be Eclipse/RadRails for Windows/Linux, and Textmate for Mac. Netbeans has completely blown Eclipse out of the water for Ruby development as Aptana+RadRails has stagnated. Textmate isn't really an IDE to begin with, it's quite a unique and useful text editor. But the pace and quality of Netbeans Ruby support would be very tough to match, so even many hardcore Textmate Mac users have switched to Netbeans

Along with JRuby and Glassfish Rails, Netbeans is proving that Sun is dead serious about being the best Ruby game in town. They've got competitors in all three areas, but they are quickly becoming a major force in the Ruby community

Re:Tried it

[jma05]

> runs like I have it on a 486, not a quad core Q6600 Intel processor.

While Netbeans is not winning any performance awards, its performance is quite acceptable. I upgraded my processor only because I was unhappy with Netbeans performance. But mine should still be 3 times slower than a Q6600 and I think the performance is OK now. Perhaps there is something wrong with your VM memory settings or such?

> I don't know how people compare Netbeans to Eclipse, actually feels native (because it IS native) and runs snappy as hell.

The primary reason is that Netbeans has better out of the box support for Java standard frameworks. Swing and J2EE tools are still ahead of Eclipse offerings. If you can, use both. But if you are using a code only app such as your JOGL project, Netbeans does not offer a whole lot.

> Not only that, but Eclipse is great for python, javascript, c/c++ and many, many other non-java technologies.

Netbeans is catching up with all that and exposes a rich client framework just like Eclipse.

Re:Tried it

[try_anything]

I'm using Eclipse to develop an RCP app. The Eclipse platform provides a lot of functionality to build on, and aside from a slow start-up, it doesn't cause any sluggishness or instability in my app.

The Eclipse IDE, on the other hand, is infuriating. I have currently have workspaces named 2007-10-04, 2007-10-11, 2007-10-19, 2007-10-21, and 2007-10-25 because that's how often Eclipse irretrievably corrupts my workspaces. I've become so used to it that instead of deleting and replacing the corrupted workspace, I just create a new one and periodically delete all the corrupted ones.

Not to mention the constant out-of-memory and PermGen errors. I bumped up the startup values for memory and permgen, but I still have to restart Eclipse every couple of days.

Still, using the Eclipse IDE is an acceptable sacrifice to be able to program on the Eclipse platform and take advantage of its amenities. Next time I start a new project of this kind, I may try NetBeans (just to see if the grass is greener,) but I probably wouldn't consider writing a Java GUI app from scratch. I would write it on top of the Eclipse platform or something similar. It's worth it to get things like application update functionality for minimal work.

Re:Sun isn't committed to GPL

[bladesjester]

As nice as Sun makes it sound, they really aren't fully committed to the GPL. They only seem to use the GPL when it suits them

A company using a license only when it makes sense to do so? How terrible!

If Sun was truly committed to free software, they would use the GPL on everything because in a true free software space it doesn't matter if your customers mix-and-match the pieces

Let's get real here, folks. Making some of your software available as open source does not mean that you should have to make *everything* you create open source. I certainly don't. Some things are open source (all of the ones on my site at the moment are GPLv2 because I loathe the moral crusade the fanatic otherwise known as RMS is trying to get the world to join in with v3); some things are commercial.

I get so sick and tired of the GPL fanboys who think that everything else is evil. The people who own the code get to decide what they want to do with it, not you. Deal with it.

If they want to give it away, be happy that you got something new to use or play with. If they want to sell it, either buy it or don't, but for the love of everything decent, stop bitching about the fact that not everything is released under your favorite license.

I've known a lot of developers that have stopped writing open source software because they got sick and tired of dealing with the fact that no matter what they released, people bitched at them because it wasn't "free enough" or because not *ALL* of their software was open source.

The whole of the world doesn't want to be Stallman followers and, to be honest, I view that as a very very good thing because the man is off his rocker.

Re:Tried it

[Lally Singh]

NB's ability to use your normal build system (ant or maven) as it's project file is what sold me. Oh, and I don't have to have this directory structure anymore:

eclipse
- 3.3
  - 1
  - 2
  - 3

Where each one is an installed copy of eclipse, and the lower numbered ones are copies that have fried themselves.

*And* a decent profiler built in :-)

Re:Tried it

[greg1104]

OTOH, maybe Eclipse is *really* focusing on the Win32 experience, and the Mac experience is just crappy?

It runs fine on both Win32 and Linux, but yes the Mac experience is crappy. Apple likes to brag [apple.com] about their Java support, but the OS X support for the SWT features needed to fully support Eclipse is spotty. Check out how long the infamous SWT_AWT not implemented [eclipse.org] bug took for them to resolve. That was a showstopper for a variety of Eclipse plug-ins, and it was open from 6/15/2004 to 4/20/2006. Things are better now, but there's still a subset of SWT_AWT not implemented that breaks some tools, like parts of the fairly popular MyEclipse: see SWT_AWT.new_Shell() unimplemented [eclipse.org] for that dreary mess, which well over a year old now.

While these specific bugs are unlikely to be the sources of your crashes etc., every time I read up on the state of Eclipse+Mac OS X I find myself distrusting that combination; the base platform seems unstable, and as you can see from these two the bugs that are found can sit for years before being fixed. Recent moves from Apple like pulling Java 6 from Leopard [symphonious.net] aren't comforting either.

Re:differences?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Developers end up making a pretty big investment in fine tuning an IDE

That is exactly why I gave-up on GUI IDE's completely like most programmers I know. My last attempt at using an IDE was with Eclipse. It was horrible on even a four CPU system w/ 4Gbytes of RAM (a huge amount for the time). I went back to where I started, using the UNIX IDE. Yes, UNIX is an IDE. UNIX got a lot of things right many years ago. Why fight the latest complete piece of crap IDE of the week when you can use a good one that has survived the test of time?

I still can't believe people are pushing Netbeans. I have to use it on a coworker's system every few weeks, and even with a very fast system I can still type faster than Netbeans can handle it. It's really sad when $3k in 2007 still won't handle keyboard input as fast as a $199 C64 in 1983. The thing is almost as slow as the VisualStudio garbage. With our (admittedly) accounting system written in .NET, it takes VS over 20 minutes to load. These new IDE's are a complete embarassment to computing.

Re:Tried it

[AdamInParadise]

I've been using Eclipse for thousands of hours, all the way back to Eclipse 2.0. I've never seen Eclipse corrupt its workspace. However, I've seen lots of badly-written plugins that do manage to mangle their own configuration files.

Are you sure that your issues at coming from Eclipse?

Re:Only matters for Netbeans mods and add-ons, rig

[AuMatar]

At one time, Visual Studio licenses said you couldn't use them to write a competing compiler. No idea if that has been removed or not.

Netbeans vs. Eclipse...again

[epistemiclife]

I think that this argument is pointless. I've used both Eclipse and Netbeans extensively for Java and C++. Now I use Netbeans, because I think that it's more pleasant to use, and it has features which appeal to me personally. However, some people like Eclipse, and that's fine. Eclipse's high customizability (lack of structure) annoys me. Some complain that Netbeans is "slow," but it really isn't. Yes, it takes about .1 seconds for the context-sensitive code-completion to pop up, but I frankly don't know any people who code faster than their IDE. If that is the case, then the code isn't very complex and such people probably don't need any IDE at all. Neither Netbeans nor Eclipse can reasonably be considered "lean," but neither are they the clunkers that some would have people believe. Those people probably haven't used it in 6 years. Both computers and Java have gotten faster since then.

Re:Go Competition

[MemoryDragon]

Depends on where your main focus is, Netbeans 6 is really exciting full ruby/rails tooling within the ide, the visual webpack simply is fantastic for small webapps and the integrated jpa support also is not too shabby. I have been using MyEclipse for years, but Netbeans slowly with every release becomes more and more a strong competitor to the Eclipse area, also mainly due to the fact that if you want something decent in eclipse you have to pay, and even then you run into the myriads of bugs the WTP is. WTP has hurt Eclipse more than anything else, and if they cannot get their act together qualitywise, Eclipse one day will be dead in the JEE area. For now it still has the credits of the incremental compilation and excellent refactoring, but if you are forced to use the WTP run as fast as you can.

Why Netbeans vs Eclipse?

[el_chupanegre]

I don't seem to get why anyone needs to pick one or the other.

Personally, for the last 3 years I've been using Eclipse 3.x and Netbeans 5.x. I can see the benefits of each, and each annoys me in it's own seperate ways.

For example, in Eclipse, why can't I add an external folder to the classpath without stupid variables? Why only a jar? In Netbeans there isn't a distinction.

To me though, Netbeans just feels alot clunkier. Once I have everything set up in Eclipse, I'm definitely more productive, with one caveat. The GUI builder in Netbeans is fantastic, it really is. Nothing free that the Eclipse world offers even comes close to competing with it. I usually do most code in Eclipse, make the GUI in Netbeans and import that into Eclipse.

So I say, why pick one over the other? You need more than one tool to build a house, why not use as many as you like to build your software?

citation required {{fact}}

[Burb]

I'd like to see proof of that one way or the other. There was a lot of discussion in the early days of Mono and Portable.NET about whether it would be problematic to write a C# compiler in C# because it would need the MS compiler to bootstrap. Furthermore, you'd need to distinuish between Microsoft's compiler and runtime (free as in beer) and Visual Studio (mine's a pint). Without being rude to the original post, this seems like it originated in FUD. I have no vested interest, I'm just asking.

Re:Tried it

[sequentially]

The timing of this article is ironic...I just tried Eclipse (and RH Dev Studio and JBoss IDE both Eclipse based) and NetBeans 5.5.1 this weekend. A few years back I considered myself a pretty good Java developer but then I switched to a new contract and had to learn MS .NET and C# (don't hold that agaisnt me please). This weekend I decided to dive back in to Java and thought that an IDE might be nice to try (previously I used VIM with CTAGS which was fast and all I needed at the time). At first, I tried Eclipse directly and must say that I wasn't so fond of its performance....if not slow then at least it is not fast, it has a billion menus and no intuitive way to find what you need (XDoclet sucks unless you are very familiar with it and all its options). Then on a whim I decided to try NetBeans 5.5.1. That tool is great (IMHO)! It is faster than Eclipse on my machine, has a layout that makes sense to me, and has a bunch of good getting started guides that really help you to learn the IDE (and for me to get me going with Java again since it's been a few years).

Re:Netbeans...

[Anonymous Coward]

Go read: http://lemnik.wordpress.com/2007/05/22/native-looking-netbeans-on-linux/ [wordpress.com]