JDeveloper or NetBeans - The Results Are Already In

If you look at this chart it does seem impressive. Really ? Does JDeveloper really have a larger community - uh no...anyone that has followed JDeveloper understands it's niche so now let's really spend time with this chart.  First, and as I said previously - a while back I gave up on the usefulness of  comparing the number of job postings of one IDE versus another relative to jobs. Why ?  Because the vast, vast  overwhelming majority of Java job postings don't bother specifying an IDE - so such a chart loses meaning.  I warned about this in the blogposting.  Now let's take the chart above and add total Java postings. 

Okay, now you understand.  Yes - that orange line that merges with the number zero is what Shay is saying is important, perhaps removing your attention from that solid green line that is not zero and shows the Java job postings.  The point is that specifying an IDE with Java makes sense only in a few contexts.   In fact, the only ones that do specify an IDE are companies have something very unique that needs to be done - something like Eclipse plugin development, NetBeans plugin development or JDeveloper ADF development. In other words, and according to the chart ... almost zero when comparing them to the total number of Java jobs.   The total number of jobs that are using Java dwarfs those jobs needing specific JDeveloper and NetBeans needs.   Shay's chart means nothing other than  companies needing proprietary APIs to be built such as ADF and Oracle APIs  need to specify that. With the exception of NetBeans RCP (which is open source) there is nothing to specify with regards to NetBeans (it's Java, Java EE, Java ME, Grails, Ruby, PHP, Python, etc that end up being specified that are pertinent to any NetBeans developer).  So I would completely expect there to be more Oracle developers dealing with a lot of proprietary Oracle APIs than developers building RCP apps - but at the end of the day it approaches zero when compared to the number of Java jobs.  As the evidence of the job posting chart show, the overwhelming majority of postings don't need to specify NetBeans, JDeveloper, Eclipse, etc.    So, this is why Shay's chart lacks meaning - it is stripped of the real information you need. [ update : Incidentally this isn't the only person/group that has posted this type of chart.  MyEclipse recently did the same thing and the results are the same as you can see from this graph.  Again, the vast Java job numbers result in the same thing, MyEclipse job numbers graphically merge with zero when compared to overall Java jobs. In the end, this type of marketing backfires when people find out what is happening. ]

Shay also attempts to explain why JDeveloper really does have a community.  Shay, I know it has a community but from every indication it doesn't seem to be very big and it is very, very focused on Oracle's proprietary products and APIs.  Since we mention surveys, personally, I like Developer.com's voting for Product of the Year - it doesn't pretend to be impartial - users simply vote for the products they use and like. Interestingly, NetBeans won the IDE of the Year last year. I didn't see JDeveloper on the runner's up list..anyway back to the topic at hand - the study you reference is, not surprisingly, skewed in a number of ways and well, we can all pick a favorite survey or study.   First,  it refers to Java IDEs - NetBeans does C, C++, RoR, Python, PHP, and bunch of other non-Java languages.  Which, of course, we know JDeveloper does not. So, with very little effort, you can see that JDeveloper playing in only the Java space is going to have less developers.   You can see from the next chart that there is more to software development than Java.  NetBeans does all those languages on the chart- and that ends up where JDevelopers falls down very badly -

Second,  while it is great that the survey of readership you refer to actually shows NetBeans has large usage (in this case 1/4 of the market - my guess is somewhere between 1/4 to 1/3)- my impressions are that the survey is probably wrong on a number of counts. The same company,  had actually done another study on  Eclipse usage which you can find on their site (relevant question is 24). So a couple of studies during the same time period with very different results and surveying the same readership, hmm.... I'm not sure I buy any of it.  By the way,  the other one shows NetBeans/Sun Studio (Sun Studio is the C/C++/Fortran version of NetBeans) at 21% and JDeveloper at 14%.  So that's a full -6% difference in the same year for JDeveloper. I tend to lend less credence to these surveys - especially if they have been paid for by somebody.  Call me cynical.

The point that is missed is that most reasonable people understand that NetBeans has a much larger community even if they use (questionable) readership survey numbers.   Oracle would be hopefully focused on addressing on how to make these communities larger and more vibrant.  I can think of a couple of ideas to do that.  One way is to announce real choice to your JDeveloper community by doing the following plugins for NetBeans :