Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal [LWN.net]

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 13, 2016 20:16 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185)
Parent article: Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Oh gosh. History seems bound to repeat itself.

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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 (subscriber, #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.