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Java Programming GNU is Not Unix

Netbeans 6 Dual-Licensed Under GPLv2, CDDL 239

Posted by kdawson from the drip-grind-caffeinated dept.
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."
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Netbeans 6 Dual-Licensed Under GPLv2, CDDL More

Netbeans 6 Dual-Licensed Under GPLv2, CDDL

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  • I don't think the Netbeans license ever made any claim on software developed within NetBeans, did it?
    • Right, NetBeans, like GCC, never imposed any license restrictions on the code generated.
      • What program does? I'd not be surprised to find some of the .NET code generators did... I've just never heard of a program in use which does... honest question, not an attempt at humour.

        • Re:Only matters for Netbeans mods and add-ons, rig (Score:4, Informative)

          by _merlin ( 160982 ) on Monday October 29, 2007 @12:05AM (#21154113) Homepage Journal
          Visual Basic (pre .NET) and RealBasic place restrictions on the generated code, because the distribution terms have to be compatible with the distribution terms on the runtime engine that the executables will require.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by AuMatar ( 183847 )
          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.
          • 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.
        • Afaict most compilers don't put restrictions on the code they generate but most compilers generate code that relies on a runtime library and there are usually conditions attatched to the redistribution of that runtime library.

  • Tried it (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 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++

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DAldredge ( 2353 )
      How long does it take to start on your Q6600?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Lally Singh ( 3427 )
      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: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by try_anything ( 880404 )
        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 workspa

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by AdamInParadise ( 257888 )
          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?
          • Yes, absolutely. I maintain a separate Eclipse install as my target platform and don't run any of my own plugins in the IDE. The only non-Eclipse plugin installed in my IDE is PyDev. I keep my projects outside the workspace; all the config files for the plugins I develop are kept in the project directories and versioned. Nothing is kept in the workspace except internal state maintained by Eclipse and its plugins. When Eclipse gets borked, I just create a new workspace and recreate all my projects, poin
            • Also, though I'm not sure it's relevant, I should mention that to test my app, I always export it rather than launching it from Eclipse. I started doing this a month ago for unrelated reasons, and it hasn't improved Eclipse's stability.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mcvos ( 645701 )
          I use Eclipse every single day, and while I've had lots of problems with it (it freezes up for a couple of minutes every once in a while, the subclipse SVN plugin corrupts my projects (subversive is much, much better), EasyWebdav throws away files (but someone fixed the discontinued WebdavPilot to work with Eclipse 3.2)), I've never seen a workspace corrupted.

          I have had that a workspace became unusable under eclipse 3.1 because I had way too many projects open (clean them up!), so I switched to 3.2 and crea

          • Re:Tried it (Score:4, Informative)

            by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Monday October 29, 2007 @06:01AM (#21155447)
            But see, that's what happens when your IDE doesn't include any features, and actually requires plug-ins for some basic tasks. A few years ago, I tried to used Eclipse to do up a quick little Java app with a GUI. Apparently, at the time, you could either hand code your GUI or install some buggy plugin that did the job OK, but not quite that well. Or if you used Netbeans, then the drag-and-drop GUI designer was included as a core part of the IDE. IDEs as far as I'm concerned need a lot of functionality, because of their purpose. If their purpose was just typing code, then we could all just settle for notepad, but those who have used a good IDE know that they are so much more than that. So they should include a lot of features as core components that are well tested and well supported, because relying on third party plugins for things that should be core components leads to a very unstable program.
          • The only non-Eclipse plugin I have installed is PyDev, and I only have eight or nine plugin projects in my workspace, all but four of which are binary plugin projects that wrap third-party libraries. The application I'm working on is fairly simple. Eclipse should be able to handle it easily.

            The workspace-corrupting crashes seem to happen while I'm manipulating GUI components (opening submenus, expanding trees, etc.) whereas long resource-intensive operations like product exports produce the apparently har

      • Re:Tried it (Score:5, Interesting)

        by greg1104 ( 461138 ) <gsmith@gregsmith.com> on Monday October 29, 2007 @12:09AM (#21154137) Homepage
        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.
        • Don't blame Apple for patchy SWT support. SWT isn't part of Java, and Apple never claimed to support it. It's up to IBM and the Eclipse project to get SWT working on OS X.

          [Opinions mine, not IBM's.]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pohl ( 872 ) *
        One interesting observation that I have made recently is that Netbeans seems to start much, much faster on Leopard than it does on Tiger. On the latter, the progress bar g ets 3/4 of the way through and pauses for a long while. On the former, it pauses just for a bit. I wonder if NB is doing some sort of multithreading of its initialization, and the concurrency is being handled on Leopard better. That's what it feels like, anyway.

    • Re:Tried it (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jma05 ( 897351 ) on Sunday October 28, 2007 @11:04PM (#21153793)
      > 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 (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Lally Singh ( 3427 ) on Sunday October 28, 2007 @11:41PM (#21153999) Journal
        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: (Score:2)

        by MythMoth ( 73648 )

        The primary reason is that Netbeans has better out of the box support for Java standard frameworks.

        How's its support for non standard frameworks though? Spring, for example, is now pretty much a requirement for most enterprise Java projects. Eclipse has a plugin created and owned by the Spring framework's developers, so while I don't really know the Netbeans situation I'd be surprised if it was as good.

        Eclipse's standard framework support is pretty good, so even if it's not as good as Netbeans I'd be reluctant to switch.

        Eclipse's only major problem that I experience is its dependency management feature

    • You tried NB 6? I run it on an average P4 with HT machine and it runs great. Our team is split 50/50 between NB and Eclipse and from what I've experienced NB not only runs better but is an easier app to use (my last project required we all use Eclipse so I'm very familiar with it).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by krelian ( 525362 )
      I am really trying to like NB but the fact that on a windows box it take 8 seconds to open the file dialog makes me crazy.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by bauerbob ( 1049344 )
      Take a look into $NETBEANS_DIRECTORY/etc/netbeans.conf and raise the memory settings by factor 3 or 4. The default settings are much too conservative for your computer.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xiaran ( 836924 )
      It's sad that a great platform like Java has such a bad rep because of one toolkit (Swing).

      I could agree more with this statement. A co-worker of mine has a passionate hate for all things java... he recently changed his bittorrent client to azereus and was saying how please he was with it(thankyou swt). I mentioned it was a java app and he didnt believe me at first... it turns out he has a passionate hate for crappy (usually swing based) java applications... a very different thing. But this attitude affects

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by sequentially ( 1181209 )
      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

    • I started developing a little JOGL app in eclipse over the weekend, and found that it pauses for up to 30 seconds when displaying the code completion for the GL class.

      Regards
      elFarto

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )
      I haven't tried 6 yet but 5 runs just fine on a 2.4 Ghz P4.
      Start up time is allways a pain with java applications but with an IDE you tend to start it and run it all day.
      If you are running slow on a quad core I have to wonder what else you are running at the same time?

  • differences? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by bwy ( 726112 )
    At this point, Eclipse is a mature, stable and feature-rich IDE with a healthy plugin community to boot.

    For someone who has been using it for years (I switched from IDEA a while back), it would take a lot to cause me to switch at this point. Developers end up making a pretty big investment in fine tuning an IDE for complex development environments, and there are so many little details around every corner that take time to uncover and learn.

    I should qualify this by saying that I'm perfectly able to s

    • For someone who has been using it for years (I switched from IDEA a while back), it would take a lot to cause me to switch at this point. Developers end up making a pretty big investment in fine tuning an IDE for complex development environments, and there are so many little details around every corner that take time to uncover and learn.

      It's probably not for you then! Having run both the big advantage of Netbeans is that it's smaller and faster than Eclipse. As someone just starting out with Java Netbea

    • it's the best Ruby IDE there is (Score:4, Interesting)

      by crayz ( 1056 ) on Sunday October 28, 2007 @10:50PM (#21153697) Homepage
      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: (Score:3, Informative)

      by MemoryDragon ( 544441 )
      It depends on the toolchain, bare eclipse is best you can get for java editing second to none. (Well Intellij is also very good but that is a different league) but if you are forced to use the WTP, then Eclipse becomes a major pain. An example, a colleque of mine was using Eclipse he had to move up to Eclipse 3.3. I recommended Europa to him because he was using parts of the toolchain anyway, after Eclipse suddenly refused to given him code insight, he reverted back. Problems like this are myriad with the W

  • GUI Builder (Score:4, Informative)

    by rpp3po ( 641313 ) on Sunday October 28, 2007 @10:37PM (#21153629)
    Netbeans is very stable and mature platform. There's nothing to bitch about. Eclipse on the other hand offers much more comfort concerning plain editing and refactoring tasks. Additionally it is part of a much more attractive ecosystem.

    Still there is one thing where Netbeans beats every other Java IDE easily: The matisse GUI builder is really fun to work with! For Java there's nothing even close. And for that alone Netbeans has a very well founded raison d'être. If it's GPL now, lets wait and see how long it takes for Eclipse to absorb that great tool. There's already a commercial port for MyEclipse, but it's not free or usable on vanilla Eclipse, yet.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by atehrani ( 785410 )
      Not to mention UML (two way), Profiling, Visual Web development, complete JEE support. What comes "out of the box" with Netbeans is impressive. I also find Netbeans far more intuitive than Eclipse (I never liked their perspective concept). Startup can be a bit sluggish, but that's really not a deal breaker. People should honestly try it out; profiling is wonderful! Helps you find your bottlenecks and those pesky resource leaks. For FREE!
      • Netbeans irks me in some small areas, no incremental compilation, if you work on webprojects you have to go the entire compile/deploy cycle every time you do changes (which means a full war packaging cycle included) I would have loved more flexibility in this area.
        • NetBeans has a nice option which let you apply the chanches in your code without having to deploy a war file or restart the application or the whole of tomcat: Run | Apply Code Changes. It does not work for every class, but it can be a real time-saver. Since ant is used under the hood all of the build scripts still have to run, but usually the whole build system is smart enough to not recompile unchanged classes.
  • Well, i like netbeans 5.5.1 anyway. When i downloaded 6 (a little while ago, i think it was m2 or something?) i was most annoyed with the lack of ability to develop c/c++ apps (or at least, the extensions from 5.5.1 hadnt been moved across yet).

    Having said that, i only use it for c/c++. I'd use it for php if it had a plugin worth using. I used to use eclipse for c/c++/php but these days i use gleany for php. I used to like eclipse, but eventually i just got annoyed with it and retired it.
    • Well, if you take ten seconds to look at the download page [netbeans.org] for NetBeans, you'll notice not only have C/C++ tools been moved, but they've got convenient packages for your needs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by pjr.cc ( 760528 )
        As i said, last time i looked which was sometime ago, it wasn't available. But i wasn't planning to try it again until 6.0 gets out of beta.

        5.5.1 + c++ = working pretty well. So the desire to mess with it is quite limited unless i stumble on a bug which halts my ability to code.

        My original point was more that 5.5.1 was quite good and 6.0 is likely to become as good which is why i moved from eclipse to it for c/c++ dev work.

  • To quote John Carmack (Score:4, Insightful)

    by boyter ( 964910 ) on Sunday October 28, 2007 @11:01PM (#21153783) Homepage
    "When text editing is less then instant on a 3ghz machine you know something is very very wrong..."

    • Re:To quote John Carmack (Score:5, Insightful)

      by eviltypeguy ( 521224 ) on Monday October 29, 2007 @12:22AM (#21154185)
      If it was just text editing and not code hinting, folding, anti-aliasing, line counting, syntax checking, and a bunch of other things all at the same time -- I might agree with that. However, in this case, I think you're misusing John's quote.
      • If it was just text editing and not code hinting, folding, anti-aliasing, line counting, syntax checking, and a bunch of other things all at the same time -- I might agree with that. However, in this case, I think you're misusing John's quote.

        Not necessarily. If your *text editor* is doing all that then something may be very very wrong, especially in your conceptual design. If it is running poorly on a 3 GHz system, then the very very wrong may be in your code implementation. The LISA assembler on the 8
      • If it was just text editing and not code hinting, folding, anti-aliasing, line counting, syntax checking, and a bunch of other things all at the same time -- I might agree with that. However, in this case, I think you're misusing John's quote.

        If the computer was a 80386, then I would agree with you. None of the things you mention is all that resource intensive. Think about it, your computer can render 3D worlds with 30fps on just the CPU, you think text editing should be this slow because of some highlighti

        • you think text editing should be this slow because of some highlighting and anti-aliasing?

          Yeah, but it's using a unified lighting and shadow model like doom 3. However because it was too dark to be eligable they had to up the contrast. Add to that some proper anti-aliassing, and you've got a real CPU/GPU hungry editor right there.

        • If the computer was a 80386, then I would agree with you. None of the things you mention is all that resource intensive.

          The parsing is. I can (and do) edit C/C++, Java, Ruby, HTML/Javascript files in parallell. In all of these, Netbeans gives me syntax highlighting, warnings for deprecated code, errors for unmatched tags in HTML, usage suggestions and method/tag documentation in all of these languages whenever I press ctrl+space.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by DMUTPeregrine ( 612791 )
        I'm pretty sure I can do all that in EMACS, and that isn't slow (anymore.) So if it is slow, there is a problem.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nurgled ( 63197 )

        I won't disagree that those are useful features, but I wouldn't want to slow my editor down to get them. If I'm ever having to wait for my text editor to do something before I can continue typing then it has failed.

  • Lean, well-featured, and fast.
    Netbeans isn't even remotely close to being lean or fast. I downloaded Netbeans 6 Beta 2 a few days ago, and it's still one of the slowest applications I've ever used. Additionally, Swing still looks terrible, doesn't fit in with the desktop, and has horrible font rendering.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gregmac ( 629064 )
      I haven't tried 6 yet, but 5.5.1 is certainly one of the slowest programs I've used in recent memory. It often takes a few seconds to switch between documents. If I'm using the code helper popups, I'm constantly waiting several seconds for them to load. Possibly the slowest part is the red underline for syntax errors - you forget a bracket or something, then a few lines later it highlights it, so you go back and fix it. It remains highlighted for another 30 seconds, then finally turns off.

      On the same machin

  • Careful there. . . (Score:5, Funny)

    by ookabooka ( 731013 ) on Sunday October 28, 2007 @11:23PM (#21153907)

    If you've been using Eclipse, Netbeans 6 is really worth a look.

    Also, if you've been using emacs, vim is worth a look. Vim is lean, well-featured, and fast.
  • The biggest difference in my mind between eclipse and NB is really external developement.

    When you look at the wide variety of extra functionality that exists (through plugins or whatever) for eclipse v's NB the difference is huge. Not only do 3rd parties take eclipse and build an IDE out of it (palm did that, but theres ALOT more than just palm), but the thousands of plugins available for eclipse are impressive. Hopefully the GPL license will mean NB starts getting more plugin dev from third parties because
  • I've never used a java IDE. I know nothing about software licences. I dont know why i just went through all the comments on this page. :(

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dareth ( 47614 )
      Thanks for the effort. Unfortunately, your comment was an improvement in the thread!
      Positively insightful.
  • 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 k

  • Why Netbeans vs Eclipse? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by el_chupanegre ( 1052384 ) on Monday October 29, 2007 @04:56AM (#21155199)

    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?

    • 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.

      This may not be any less annoying, but you can "Add Class Folder" to the classpath, "Create New Folder", "Advanced >>", "Link to folder in the file system" and point it at your external source. If you just need to add it to a runtime classpath, you can do that under the "Classpath" tab in the "Open run dialog..." window, go to "User Entries", "Advanced...", "Add External Folder". It would be nice if the runtime classpath functionality was also the build classpath functionality.

  • No. Not really. TurboPascal for DOS might've been lean, and Java IDEa like BlueJ are lean, but Netbeans is large and slow if you run it on older hardware. It'll still work, but not quickly.

    I think some folks are forgetting that not everyone is doing development on 3GHz desktops... :-)

  • new Netbeans 6 beta 2 has great Ruby support (Score:4, Informative)

    by MarkWatson ( 189759 ) on Monday October 29, 2007 @09:32AM (#21156777) Homepage
    I used to do most of my Ruby and Ruby on Rails coding using TextMate but I have switched to using NetBeans. Beta 2 understands Ruby code well enough for (mostly) meaningful code completions and having popup documentation for the standard classes is useful. The integration of the "fast debugger" is also handy. Rails support is also very good. I usually use native (Matz C) Ruby, but NetBeans supports JRuby also. BTW, I used to use Common Lisp, Ruby, and Java about equally in my work, but recently I have been living with the Ruby performance hit and I am starting to use Ruby for just about everything that I do.
    • One other thing: I like to keep a copy of NetBeans 6 beta 2 with only Ruby/Rails support added: I am not sure if it helps startup time, but it is a small price to pay, disk storage wise.

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