Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal [LWN.net]

Geertjan Wielenga posted a proposal to the Apache incubator list to adopt NetBeans, an open source development environment, tooling platform, and application framework. "NetBeans has been run by Oracle, with the majority of code contributions coming from Oracle. The specific reason for moving to Apache is to expand the diversity of contributors and to increase the level of meritocracy in NetBeans. Apache NetBeans will be actively seeking new contributors and will welcome them warmly and provide a friendly and productive environment for purposes of providing a development environment, tooling environment, and application framework." (Thanks to Stephen Kitt)

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Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 13, 2016 20:16 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (15 responses)

Oh gosh. History seems bound to repeat itself.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 13, 2016 20:30 UTC (Tue) by Risthel (guest, #103897) [Link] (6 responses)

Apache is again being used as "bin can" of nearly dead opensource projects...

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 13, 2016 21:05 UTC (Tue) by Per_Bothner (subscriber, #7375) [Link] (5 responses)

Well, there is a difference from OpenOffice: With NetBeans there isn't any competing more-vibrant fork of the same code-base but competing license. As far as I know there are no major forks - it just hasn't been getting as much Love as one might hope for.

There are competing projects in the same space (most obviously Eclipse), but they're not based on the same code-base. In terms of core design there are some fundamental benefits of NetBeans (compared to Eclipse):

NetBeans uses the same javac compiler from OpenJDK as when people compile on the command-line or make/Ant/Maven/... This avoids inconsistencies as well as dupliacte effort. Eclipse uses their own compiler.
Eclipse uses their own SWT toolkit, which to me seems like a lot of hard-to-justify effort while NetBeans uses the trusty Swing toolkit.

Eclipse Che might chance this (haven't looked much at it).

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 6:17 UTC (Wed) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link] (4 responses)

Not only eclipse, there is also IntelliJ idea, which has become open source (well open core) under Apache 2.0 license. They also use swing, and unlike netbeans, doesn't look like '90s throwback ui.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 9:24 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

Not really comparable. With Netbeans you get the whole thing as open source, including a more diverse language support. IntelliJ open source edition supports only for Java and some other JVM languages.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 18:07 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Eclipse supports tons of languages if you want it. IntelliJ also has a healthy ecosystem of third-party language support plugins (for Bash, Go, Rust and so on).

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 13:00 UTC (Wed) by TMM (guest, #79398) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't know what it looks like on other platforms but SWT on a Linux desktop with GTK looks way better than the swing interfaces of Netbeans and IntelliJ.

I can't speak for the quality of the Java portions of the IDEs but in my estimation at this moment Eclipse CDT is the best C/C++ IDE around, at least on the Linux platform. Great Valgrind and autotools support for instance.

The only other IDE that comes close now is KDEvelop 5.0, but it doesn't have all of CDT's features quite yet.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 14:30 UTC (Wed) by hunger (subscriber, #36242) [Link]

I prefer Qt Creator for C and C++ work. Nice and fast, the ideal IDE for people that hate IDEs;-)

OK, autotools support needs to be enabled Help->About Plugins before it can be used, but then it works pretty well for the projects I tried to open with it so far.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 13, 2016 21:02 UTC (Tue) by hunger (subscriber, #36242) [Link] (7 responses)

To be fair: NetBeans sees way more commits per month than OpenOffice ever did since joining Apache. In fact they get round about as many commits per month as LibreOffice, which seems fairly healthy to me as an outside observer. So there is a chance I think.

What is a bit worrying though is that LibreOffice has way more contributors per month than netbeans has and LibreOffice also has way less code (>10% of netbeans!) to maintain. If Oracle pulls the plug on Netbeans, then it will be a challenge to maintain such a huge code base.

All data points taken straight from https://www.openhub.net/p/libreoffice and https://www.openhub.net/p/netbeans. Probably not perfect, but usually good enough to get a feel for the sizes of projects.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 0:21 UTC (Wed) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (5 responses)

100M lines of code for Netbeans sounds way too high.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 5:17 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (4 responses)

100M lines of code for Netbeans sounds way too high.

It certainly is far too high. I got 9 905 776 lines of Java from a copy of Netbeans 8.0 sources I happened to have sitting on my PC. This figure ignores XML and other non-Java files, but most of Netbeans is written in Java. I don't have time for a more precise accounting, but I think this was enough to determine the quoted Openhub figure must be wrong by an order of magnitude.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 5:44 UTC (Wed) by hunger (subscriber, #36242) [Link] (3 responses)

There are 16 repositories ananlyzed and summed up under "netbeans" by openhub. On the Apache mailing list there is talk about having to migrate 33 repositories.

So they do have move a *lot* of code into Apache. Somebody has to know all that code -- if only to decide what can get scrapped and what needs to be kept.

But even assuming about 10 million lines of code as suggested in this thread earlier: That would still put it squarely above Libreoffice (which is listed with 5 repositories, totalling about 7.8 Million lines in all those repositories).

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 12:53 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

Don't forget the massive code cleanup that went on in LO. How big is the current release, compared to OOo as thrown over the wall by Oracle?

IFF Apache do a proper cleanup on netbeans, the size of the code base could well shrink dramatically ...

One only has to look at the linux kernel for an example of a project with a small central core and a large periphery - most of the linux code is device drivers which are to no small extent "write and forget".

I guess LO has a similar core of routines which are used across all its programs where most of the work/churn goes.

And if netbeans is anywhere similar, again the core is going to get a lot of tlc and the rest? Well if it bit-rots it'll get thrown out, and if it gets tlc it'll improve. But if Oracle looked after netbeans any way like they look after VirtualBox, or looked after OOo, there'll certainly be plenty of room for such a cleanup.

Cheers,
Wol

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 14:49 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

One consequence of Netbeans being written in Java and Swing is that there probably is less redundant reinvention of basic infrastructure to clean up. OOo came with its own GUI library and (from what I have heard) several implementations of the string type... But there may of course be other kinds of waste hiding there.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 15:43 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

I remember this article about the Star Division StarOffice toolkit:

http://www.drdobbs.com/cpp/examining-the-starview-applica...

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 5:54 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Well, that's the Oracle pattern I'm seeing repeated: move project to Apache, fire in-house development team, nobody left to maintain the code.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 13, 2016 22:20 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (7 responses)

NetBeans? Really?

Eclipse is miles ahead of NetBeans and IntelliJ is miles ahead of Eclipse. Even the OpenSource "community" version of IntelliJ. I'm doing a lot of Java development and I haven't seen anything IntelliJ and Eclipse used for a very long time.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 12:51 UTC (Wed) by imMute (guest, #96323) [Link] (2 responses)

Eclipse is used as a framework IDE for various microcontroller companies. I know that Freescale's CodeWarrior is now just Eclipse + a set of plugins for device specific functionality (it used to be a custom built IDE that sucked worse than Eclipse ever has). Xilinx also uses Eclipse as the base of their Zynq (an SoC) Software Development Kit ("SDK") which has many integrations to their FPGA workflows and device programming workflows. There is at least one other microcontroller company that uses Eclipse as the base of their SDK, but I can't remember which one at the moment.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 13:27 UTC (Wed) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

There's also Synopsys's MetaWare Development Toolkit for their ARC processors - I think that used to have a (ugly) custom-built GUI, but now it uses Eclipse.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 13:49 UTC (Wed) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]

IngeDev, the Ingenico POS terminal SDK, is also based on Eclipse.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 13:28 UTC (Wed) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (2 responses)

Netbeans has one feature I haven't seen anywhere else: Coccinelle-like semantic patching and refactoring support, a descendant of James Gosling's project called Jackpot. Its documentation is woefully inadequate and it has some serious limitations but it's really nice.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 18:09 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

IntelliJ obviously also has it: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/2016.2/structural-sea...

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 20, 2016 9:57 UTC (Tue) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

Nice. I was rather expecting it in the analyze menu, not search. What I like with this feature in NB is that I can create a set of scripts and launch them on a project all at once. I'll have to investigate it in Idea.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 17, 2016 18:36 UTC (Sat) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]

Eclipse4 is apparently pissing off a lot of people, or so I hear from LWN (link attached to first quote goes into long detail about where Eclipse has gone wrong).

IntelliJ is still viewed fairly skeptically by a lot of open-source folks. If you want more than basic Java-related functionality, you either have to go with the non-free version, or rely on third-party extensions of unknown/dubious/unreliable quality. There isn't even an official Debian package yet, which reduces my interest to near-zero. (I'm not a Java guy in general.)

There might just be a window of opportunity here for the Netbeans folks. A tiny one they'd have to exploit like mad, and they may not have the manpower, but it's better than nothing.

I also note that Netbeans has come back from being "dead" before, and managed to surprise a lot of people with how well they bounced back. Not saying they can do it again, but I'm at least willing to adopt a wait-and-see attitude.

If they decided to focus on being small, fast, and light-weight (relatively speaking), they could really get my attention! (But I'm not holding my breath on that either.)

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 14, 2016 6:59 UTC (Wed) by Otus (subscriber, #67685) [Link]

> [...] though Oracle will relinquish its control over NetBeans, individual contributors from Oracle are expected to continue contributing to NetBeans after it has been contributed to Apache [...]

Fingers crossed.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 20, 2016 3:08 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

Here's hoping Oracle dumps the whole Java apparatus, lock, stock, and barrel, on Apache, and let it all rot quietly and die without drawing in any more waves of suckers with careers to blight.

That said, better them than me.

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 20, 2016 4:11 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Why? Java is a nice language for services (when you don't care about JVM startup time). It's not the most beautiful language, but it's quite powerful.