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Comment by amalcon | Hacker News Reader

It's been a while since I've seen the name NetBeans! It was basically the Java IDE for a little while there, until Eclipse took over. Eclipse basically won because NetBeans used Swing for UI, and Swing was hot garbage back then -- the features were otherwise almost exactly the same.

Neat to see the project still hanging on, albeit pretty tenuously.

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No, I think Eclipse won because multi IBM dinero for marketing (back in the day) while Netbeans was... just zese guys, you know. Yeh, later they got some Sun support, but initially it was just... open source?

I remember it as Eclipse taking over from Forte 4 Java, then NetBeans trying to regain share with various gimmicks, culminating with a fancy GUI layout tool that would have been excellent if it hadn't been exclusive to NetBeans.

Ehe I've yet another perception, I remember eclipse was what everyone used in my circles back then, mostly because it was the ide used for university courses.

Then forte died of acquisition, forte for Java bombed and NetBeans took over some interesting "4gen" features, so like given a table he would go and create the whole crud in swing on top. For a while it seemed to grow strongly but then eclipse opening up rcp fagocitated all thick client projects and NetBeans was left to dry.

It was almost 20yr ago so the time line is fuzzy, but this is how I recall it.

I could be mistaken as well, but this is the old Sun page for the IDE I'm referring to:

https://archive.ph/Qzllr

It looks like ffj predates the NetBeans acquisition, but it's hard to tell without a definitive reference. I found the original URL above via the C2 wiki.

so tried some googling and this old article conflates the two, so I'm now even more confused

https://www.developer.com/java/ejb/sun-forte-for-java-and-ne...

And now the leading Java IDE uses Swing anyway (IntelliJ).

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