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Comment by satysin | Hacker News Reader

I have always felt NetBeans lagged behind Eclipse (and Idea) under Sun and even more so under Oracle. I think transferring to Apache would be a good thing overall for the NetBeans project.

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I personally enjoy NetBeans more than Eclipse or any other Java IDE. There is something about Eclipse interface I just hate. But it always felt "less pluggable" and harder to customize than other prominent IDE. But it looks like it will definitely loose momentum without any real corporate support.

All in all, languages "shouldn't have IDE". They should provide services as separate apps that should be pluggable and used in any editor. That's something Go did well as it provides a code completion server and code quality tools and any dev can make a plugin out of them for any editor.

It makes things easier to develop and maintain for service developers, plugin developers and IDE developers.

I would love to be able to use Netbeans features without using Netbean itself, without being tied to the IDE.

There's actually now a common specification for language services (pioneered by Microsoft for Visual Studio Code), and Red Hat are implementing it for Eclipse:

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-coden...

I don't whether anyone is working on this for Netbeans, though.

Codenvy has added it into Che - shipping in a few weeks. Red Hat is adding it into Eclipse. And IBM is adding it into Orion. There is collaboration from Microsoft, Mulesoft, Salesforce, Zend, IBM, Red Hat and Typefox around the language services and proposal.

The big piece that is missing is a language server registry so that any tool can discover, install and register locally a language service. That will come next.

> The big piece that is missing is a language server registry so that any tool can discover, install and register locally a language service. That will come next.

According to the link:

> Language server registry: Language servers are published as part of a global registry, built by Codenvy as an Eclipse project and hosted by the Eclipse Foundation, to make language servers discoverable for any tool to consume.

Sounds pretty cool. It's certainly a sad state of affairs when we look at existing projects like http://editorconfig.org and see that it only really covers indentation; we programmers should be those most able to configure and improve our own tools!

I really think there's a lot of low-hanging fruit for improving the programming workflow, and I think it begins by decoupling basic functionality like this from the monolithic IDEs they've traditionally inhabited.

We're able but we don't do it, since there's a 9 to 5 job with a manager that always screams we work to slowly, and then after work we have to pick up kids, do the dishes and what have you.

Didn't Steve Yegge talked about something like this a couple of years ago [0]. This is sort of a version of that. A fantastic thing if this really gets going. Surprised that this is the firsts I'm hearing of this.

[0] https://plus.google.com/u/0/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSK...

Not really.

Eclipse doesn't have a nice Swing/JavaFX UI designer like Netbeans does, EMAT isn't a match to the Netbeans profiling tools and the web tooling from Netbeans allows workflows not possible in Eclipse.

For example when editing JSF files you automatically get completion to the session beans, or JavaScript code. Editing JavaScript code takes into account the JSLint documentation and besides completion there is static analysis taking place as one types.

Eclipse has WindowBuilder[0] that can be used to design Swing/SWT UIs (no JavaFX AFAIK).

[0] - https://www.eclipse.org/windowbuilder/

I know, but it isn't as feature rich as Matisse.

Netbeans runs on anything with a JVM, Eclipse is a lot harder to port to different systems.

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