Netbeans, Eclipse and Oracle Sun

Image via CrunchBase

What will happen to Netbeans with the Oracle acquisition of Sun? Once the merger happens I think it will become obvious surprisingly quickly.

Netbeans is the number one competition to Eclipse which is of course owned by IBM. With that said and the number one alternative to Eclipse, Oracle may go full guns on adoption and of course lots of new capabilities and features Netbeans would be available in short order. That would be my guess. One more straw to grasp from IBM.

On the other hand, Oracle also purchased BEA Weblogic which uses Eclipse as its IDE. That would mean a substantial cost to convert, as well as some alienation by developers un-wanting to make the switch to a new IDE no matter whose it was.

Yes there are all those other IDE's that Oracle also owns. But how far have they gone, not far. But Netbeans is a competitor.

You can read from developer comment to developer comment (only counting ones that have actually used current versions of both) I use Eclipse at work, because I have to, but I prefer and use Netbeans for personal projects. Yes I to have fallen into this category.

Why do I like Netbeans better? Its not a reason commonly given. The interaction with CM is much better! I have seen many numbers of my development team mangle or loose checkins, commits, and all sorts of other misshapes in Eclipse when dealing with CM repositories. To me that is loss productivity, and development costs. But that is a side issue to the article.

I think Oracle will be good for Netbeans as a serious competition to yet another IBM product. IBM the only commercial competitor to Oracles core business line.