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The IDE Is Key, Says NetBeans Engineering Manager

The NetBeans IDE 4.1 beta, released on February 25, is the latest effort in Sun's drive to simplify enterprise Java development for the average programmer. Built on the NetBeans platform 4.0, it also is a competitive response to the success of the Eclipse platform, which has devoured market share in the Java IDE space. DevX caught up with Tim Cramer, engineering director for NetBeans, to get the inside scoop on this new NetBeans release and the escalating war with Eclipse.

"The big thing that's new in 4.1 is the out-of-the-box support for integrating J2EE development. Specifically, we're heavily tied to the Sun Java System App Server 8.1, so it's J2EE 1.4 based," explained Cramer. EJB component architectures and Web services also are included in its J2EE support.

"We're trying to make development of J2EE applications—especially EJB applications—possible for a mere human being to actually develop to," Cramer said. "Going forward, we're going to be one of the first ones out of the box with J2EE 5 support, once that becomes a standard."

Along with these features, Sun is further enticing users of other IDEs—particularly Eclipse—to migrate to the new NetBeans IDE with its "Switch to NetBeans IDE" program. The NetBeans IDE 4.1 beta provides an Import Eclipse Module that enables developers to perform automated imports of existing Eclipse source files that utilize Java. The transition is not seamless, however, because NetBeans and Eclipse use divergent toolkits for GUI development. NetBeans uses the 100-percent Java Swing toolkit, while Eclipse utilizes SWT, a toolkit that accesses the user-interface facilities of the operating system on which it is implemented.

"What the Eclipse Importer does is merely change the proprietary format that Eclipse has for their project setup into one that NetBeans can understand," Cramer explained. "It actually doesn't go through your code and get rid of the proprietary SWT toolkit that [Eclipse has] and convert that over to Swing. You actually have to go in and modify your code."

For many developers, the choice between NetBeans and Eclipse largely has been a choice between Swing and SWT, with the latter offering better performance. "When SWT first came out and people were frustrated with the performance of Swing, people moved over to SWT and were really excited about the speed," Cramer recalled. "With J2SE 5 now, Swing performs very well. Anyone who's trying out 4.1, they're like 'oh, I guess Swing's not a problem anymore.' We keep hearing that over and over. It's certainly not a speed advantage [to remain on Eclipse]."

Cramer believes the early success of Eclipse spurred Sun to produce a competitive product. "People had some bad experiences with NetBeans [when Sun released it to the open source community nearly five years ago], then Eclipse comes along [with] SWT [in November 2001]—it's running faster, it's lightweight, all that stuff. It was a great kick in the butt for the NetBeans team."

In recent months, the NetBeans team has seen the fruits of its labor, according to Cramer. "The number of downloads that we've had since the inception of NetBeans is a little over 4 million. That's over five years. With 4.0, we've gotten slightly more than 1 million downloads. So we've had one fourth of our total activity over five years only in the last six months or so."

This newfound interest in NetBeans has thinned the herd in the Java IDE market, with some major software vendors' products taking the heaviest hits. "I think free IDEs are eating everyone's lunch right now and companies have to decide if that's a critical thing for them to be developing or not," Cramer said. "It's a matter of where you believe the tool fits in your product lifecycle development and how that helps you capture sales."

Citing BZ Media's Fourth Annual Java Use and Awareness Study from November 2004, he said, "If you compare November 2003 with November 2004, you'll see that there are only three IDEs that are gaining market share: it's Eclipse, which has been phenomenal; it's NetBeans, which is growing at 35 percent year-over-year, and IntelliJ [IDEA], which went from like 8 to 12 [percent]. Everybody else is going in the tank right now."

Editor's Note: Actually, Visual SlickEdit also made a modest gain from 2.5 to 2.7 percent.

"Borland [whose JBuilder and Enterprise Studio for Java IDEs dropped more than 35 percent in market share during the same period, according to the BZ Media study] obviously decided it's not any kind of competitive advantage to have a decent IDE and moved over to Eclipse," said Cramer. "Obviously Sun feels differently. We believe the IDE is key and the development tool is key. So Sun is completely committed right now to NetBeans."

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