Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal [LWN.net]

Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

Posted Sep 13, 2016 20:30 UTC (Tue) by Risthel (guest, #103897)
In reply to: Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal by halla
Parent article: Apache NetBeans Incubator Proposal

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

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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.