This morning I have received a proudly announcement about the early availability of Netbeans 4.1. Wow, stop for a moment and read again. Oh yes, 4.1. I think the guys feel how they are missing their targets and how far behind they are against the other competitors and I guess they decided to recover this by launching numbers. Yes indeed, numbers. Netbeans 4.0 is not yet out and they already announce a 4.1.
I don’t consider this a bad strategy (take for example Eclipse which is very dynamic about their releases, or even IntelliJ IDEA), but do not forget that they have praised this release for about 1 year. I guess that, between the lines, we can read: “Hey guys we have missed it again. Don’t bother for 4.0 as we already realized there will be soon a 4.1. Go for that one instead.”
Netbeans … what’s that?
Filed under Tools
mindstorms 
Or it could be that 4.0 and 4.1 have different projects they target. For example, NetBeans is becoming full J2EE compliant (no extra modules, no payware, no half-baked modules that freeze the IDE). Eclipse is not. NetBeans is integrating a full profiler (JFluid). Eclipse does not have one. NetBeans is light years ahead of Eclipse on web tools.
NetBeans is getting lots of attention. Read the forums – even some Eclipse developers are beginning to use it.
Oke I see your point. But what do you mean by full J2EE compliant? The fact it has a decent XML/HTML editor, JSP editor and/or you can start/stop/deploy your applications directly from within? I agree that the editors must be there in every IDE. Starting/stoping and deploying from within is imo just something that will make it heavier and heavier and I cannot see the direct benefits of this.
It doesn’t bother me to have more modules from where to choose exactly what I need, even if this means to pay for some of them.
I am happy to see that no half-baked modules that freeze the IDE is seen as a feature in Netbeans – this confirms in a way my thoughts [smile/].
I am not sure what do you mean by light years ahead of Eclipse? Have you tried Lomboz or MyEclipse?
Finally I will say it again: I am not against Netbeans or against evolution of IDEs. I am against bad announcements, bad promises and failures.
No, announcing 4.1 Early Access before the 4.0 final release is not a way of saying “NetBeans 4.0 is not worth trying”. After all, why don’t you give NetBeans 4.0 a try, the beta2 is now out and the latest q-build is even better. It is a complete release that works end to end. Just try it out and let us know what you think.
NetBeans 4.1 extends 4.0 by support for development of EJBs and web services – that’s something that 4.0 does not do and does not claim to do. 4.1 is not a hotfix for 4.0, it’s a significant feature release.
What this announcement means is – we are serious about improving NetBeans and we are progressing fast.
Petr Jiricka, the NetBeans team.
Thanks for the feeback Petr. Indeed, I am going to put them to work side to side.