Nov
11

Netbeans 6.7 and 6.8

admin NetBeans, sun Add your comment

Really irritated with Netbeans 6.8 Beta: suddenly there are plugins missing (SOA, XML Schema Editor and WSDL) and if you are not careful to uninstall existing instances of Glassfish V3 then NB throws exceptions when you activate the Java EE and Web module.  Worse, NB then hangs. 

On the missing plugins, you can get access to the missing XML Schema Editor plugin by adding a new update center:
- Name: NetBeans Dev
- URL: http://updates.netbeans.org/netbeans/updates/6.8/uc/m1/dev/catalog.xml.gz
But when I tried to install it from here, I got this error:

ScreenHunter_01 Oct. 30 23.11

So this might be the reason they left it out of 6.8, but it would have been good to be warned and even better if a fix had been promised.  My cynical side wonders whether this is some sort of stealthy de-scoping of ‘enterprise’ features, coinciding eerily with progress on the Oracle/Sun deal and a less then fulsome commitment from Oracle on the future of Netbeans.  I do hope I’m wrong, but other folk clearly think that Oracle’s view of NB is ambivalent at best.

Meanwhile, back to more practical things Netbeans-related.  Have you recently updated your JDK installation (to JDK 6 Update 17)?  What happened when you next ran Netbeans?  Did you see a dialog telling you NB couldn’t find the JDK?

Annoyingly, when Netbeans installs itself, it creates an entry in the netbeans.conf file (in C:\Program Files\NetBeans 6.7\etc or the equivalent path in your installation) containing the explicit JDK path, e.g.

  # Default location of JDK, can be overridden by using –jdkhome <dir>:
  netbeans_jdkhome="C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_17"

It’s seems a small thing, but forcing a user to fix this by locating and manually editing a configuration file is desperately poor.  As NB makes this check as it starts up, it should make more of an effort to detect alternative JDK installations, present the user with what it finds and offer to adjust the configuration for you.  It wouldn’t be hard.

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Apr
28

As the Sun sets…

admin Java, Java Technology, NetBeans, sun 1 comment

Why does Oracle’s purchase of Sun make me feel slightly sad?  Silly, sentimental reaction, isn’t it?  I should know better. After all, today’s Sun isn’t the super-confident (some would say arrogant) innovator and market leader I grew up with: arguably, today’s Sun needs rescuing from itself, needs a sharper focus on what it does best, and to sell more of fewer things.

But I have a soft spot for Sun. My first proper programming job involved writing C/C++ (and using Cfront – remember that?) on a Sun-3 workstation, and various versions were part of my working life for some time. I loved the solid feel of these machines. Remember the optical mouse that only worked on those special, shiny metal mats?

Between then and now, my only links to Sun have been through OpenOffice and Java. I played with Java quite early on, abandoned it in favour of Microsoft .NET, but have recently (and happily) returned to it. For the last couple of years I’ve been an enthusiastic user of NetBeans – I do hope Oracle recognizes just how good NetBeans is.  I have also tried OpenSolaris: ZFS is simply awe-inspiring, and very nearly enough on its own to make me run OpenSolaris, though truthfully I don’t think I need ZFS, and Windows remains simply more convenient and usable for everyday.

I’ve used OpenOffice for a long, long time.  I know Writer pretty well, warts and all. You need to ignore some of the cosmetic shortcomings, persevere with it and appreciate its fundamental strengths; things which I think make Writer better than Word. Occasionally I use OOo Writer to help colleagues debug and rescue Word documents which have evolved uncontrollable formatting: it amuses me to be using a free tool to clean-up after a rather expensive one.  I really hope Oracle will resource and manage the OpenOffice program properly. With the right additional effort, they have a potential Office-beater.

But the crown-jewels are Java itself, and the NetBeans IDE.  Everyone is trying to second-guess what Oracle will do with Java: I don’t have anything to add.  But I really want to add my voice to those hoping Oracle will recognize just how good NetBeans has become, not just as the best Java IDE out there, but also a first-class platform for building rich-clients.

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Nov
14

Community and Culture

admin Java, NetBeans, microsoft, software, sun 1 comment
While looking around for Java dependency tools I came across KirkK’s site, and his JarAnalyzer.  As usual, I wanted to know a little more about the person behind the software, so looked up his blog and found an article from 2007 there which really resonated with me: .Net : Software & Technology @kirkk.com

Kirk and I have travelled in opposite directions: he crossed the tracks to work on a .NET project, whilst I’ve recently shifted my attention almost completely from .NET and the Microsoft environment (where I have spent the last 10 or so years) to the world of Java.  What’s interesting is that he so quickly formed the same view of the Microsoft development that motivated my move to Java.

Microsoft’s greedy behaviour has done so much damage to its reputation and the level of goodwill amongst independent developers. Kirk cites the example of TestDriven.Net, but there are examples of other ‘alt.net’ type projects (NAnt and NDoc, for example) which Microsoft has effectively (though not directly) either killed or marginalised, not with licensing terms but by introducing proprietary (and arguably weaker) competing technologies.  I’m sure that part of the reason for that, with the N-prefixed projects at least, was that they couldn’t bear the prospect of absorbing something with what they would see as alien DNA into their product line.

This piece by Mike Hofer describes the NDoc demise and nicely summarises the twin underlying problems: the nature of the development community surrounding the Microsoft platform, and Microsoft’s inability (or unpreparedness) to work with it. Mike’s article, and the linked post by Charles Chen containing the email from NDoc’s founder, make for quite depressing reading. Perhaps the emergence of a mean-spirited, mean-minded community is to be expected, when the centre of its universe is an avaricious commercial juggernaut?

I feel these things especially keenly, now that I’m looking over the wall from the Java community side.  The contrast really couldn’t be more stark, more impressive and more compelling.  Even the large companies operating in this space, notably Sun Micrososystems, appear intelligent, enlightened and innovative; there’s a very healthy culture here. (A quick and revealing experiment: take Microsoft and Sun – now try to find the corresponding CEO’s blog. Top hit in Google for Steve Ballmer when I tried was a send-up site; top hit in Google for Jonathan Schwartz was Jonathan Schwartz’s blog. And it’s worth reading).

Coming back to the issue of building a healthy community around a technology, Sun’s Java is surely the shining example of how to embrace the great work done by independent developers and build on it, rather than trying to crush it. Just look at NetBeans: this is an enterprise-quality IDE, easily the equal of Visual Studio, but not only is it open-source (and free to download) it also employs established open-source tools instead of imposing inferior alternatives: For unit testing, JUnit is completely integrated; NetBeans uses Apache Ant as its underlying build-system; it can work seamlessly with Maven through the excellent plugin. And you choose the version-control system you prefer (e.g. Mercurial, Subversion) and NetBeans will allow you to make full use of it, right inside the IDE.

Lastly, you are free to extend NetBeans by writing whatever plugins (modules) you please, without running the risk of getting into litigious exchanges like the TestDriven.Net debacle described here, which seems to me to plumb the very depths of time-wasting pointlessness.

I never intended to write all that: it was originally just a reaction to a (rather old) blog entry. But as I revisited the world of the Microsoft monoculture through the tale of those N-projects, it just tumbled out.


Jul
07

Netbeans 6 – it’s getting better all the time

admin NetBeans, microsoft, sun Add your comment

It’s great to see the Netbeans QA process working so well. I reported two issues recently, and both have been fixed. One was a Subversion related issue; within 24 hours I was contacted by the developer assigned to the issue, and offered a patched jar to try! It fixed the problem, and the patch will be rolled-up in v6.5. Impressive.

Netbeans is getting better, faster, than anything else out there, as far as I can see. There are some things I still don’t think are good enough yet (such as the UML support) and I wish the whole thing would start up much more quickly, but it’s important to recognize just how good this tool already is. And it’s a free, small download. The comparison with Visual Studio is almost irresistable; VS is a DVD’s worth of code, costs a fortune and offers a much less capable code editor, less refactoring support and doesn’t really support rich client development to the extent NB6 does.

Look the the Ruby support in NB6, too: although there is a lot of interesting work going on with dynamic languages at Microsoft, the impression you get is that these are somewhat ’second-class’ projects with no real presence in the main-line Visual Studio product plans. JRuby, on the other hand, is almost front-and-centre in the Netbeans world. The integration of languages via the JVM, and the development of integrated tooling in Netbeans makes it possible to do serious work with Java and Ruby, right now.

Another thing: Sun isn’t trying to shut-down or marginalise any of the community, open-source projects which populate the Java tools landscape. Instead, they’ve recognized and accepted the strongest members of the community and built tool support for them in Netbeans. Just take the most obvious examples: Ant, JUnit and Maven. Compare that with what Microsoft has done: ignored NDoc and produced Sandcastle, created MSBuild to replace NAnt, and they want you to use (therefore buy) their own version-control system rather than embrace Subversion or Mercurial. I’m sure Team System is probably fine, as long as you have deep pockets and you are prepared to submit totally to Microsoft’s prescription for your development team processes.