Always reading bits...
Its the shadows and reflections cast from the future that interest me.
Restaurant Reviews
Flickr - Latest Photos
cld
Oracle's Missed Opportunity
posted Sunday, 8 November 2009
I recently bought a new inexpensive laptop (a simple MSI A6000-029US, 16" screen, Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T6600, 4 GB of memory and a 320 GB drive) at a local Office Depot. I had some questions so I went back. The person at the help desk looked at my computer and said - "Oh, you use NetBeans". I asked them if they used it - they did. We talked for awhile about all things NetBeans can do and then I had to go. It's an interesting reality that I bumped into. First, four years ago, I doubt I would have had this conversation. The size of the NetBeans community has really grown outward and it has a footprint that extends beyond Java into some of the most popular languages being used today. It also has excellent Java tools that make it extremely attractive - from a sophisticated profiler to the best Swing GUI designer to a visual web construction facility. Second, NetBeans has succeeded in creating a large open-source -based ecosystem. NetBeans has grown very rapidly - no doubt at the expense of other IDE's such as JDeveloper. Most new Java developers start with Eclipse or NetBeans or IntelliJ - I don't think I have ever met anyone that started learning Java with Oracle JDeveloper. It's possible they are out there somewhere - but its such a small subset. That's because the primary purpose of JDeveloper is oriented around ... well ... Oracle. If you are not particularly interested in Oracle's products ... it a low probability event that you will chose Oracle as your IDE - even if you are not a beginner. Even so I was interested in seeing whether Oracle would understand that NetBeans has a large developer ecosystem that dwarfs JDeveloper and a platform that companies actually use for a multitude of purposes - NetBeans Rich Client Platform, Java EE, Java ME, Java SE, JavaFX, Groovy/Grails, Ruby, Scala, Wicket, C/C++, OpenOffice apps, Python, JavaScript and the list goes on and on, with the latest addition being Clojure . Oracle's recent announcement with regards to NetBeans :
In one way, this was somewhat welcome news that they recognize that NetBeans has a huge following (not quite as big as Eclipse but NetBeans has been gaining). Oracle, on the face of their words, plans to offer NetBeans. However this is a pretty typical corporate-speak announcement that does little for Oracle except barely avoiding animosity from this community. I've used Google Trends to provide a view on the trendlines between three IDEs - I've excluded Eclipse from this graph - Eclipse currently has the largest community. Using Google trends we can look at NetBeans, Oracle JDeveloper and IntelliJ IDEA:
It should be mentioned at this point - that JDeveloper is actually third behind IntelliJ IDEA (another excellent IDE). I think Oracle missed a real opportunity to actually leapfrog out of their straight-jacketed thinking on software development. JDeveloper is not a platform in any recognizable use of the word other than in a very strange mutation which describes anything created by any IDE as a platform. This, of course, is not the commonly used definition of a platform found in NetBeans and Eclipse. There are enough applications built ontop of the the core Platform APIs of the Eclipse and NetBeans platforms that this shouldn't be a source of confusion. What should have happened, Oracle should not have missed a beat and should have announced work on Oracle plugins for NetBeans and active Oracle support of NetBeans. This type of announcement would have brought a large and some-what skeptical NetBeans community much closer to Oracle. It would have been a big win for Oracle. NetBeans will continue to grow either way - but Oracle has missed a big chance to really change perceptions and at the same time move their tools to another level. What JDeveloper lacks is buzz, a wealth of community developed plugins, a wealth of support for other languages and a very, very large community. And of course it does not offer a platform in the NetBeans and Eclipse sense of the word. This is a huge missed opportunity for Oracle. |
