Wednesday July 14, 2004

I read Eric Gunnerson's summary on JavaOne. In the Java IDE section, he states "The fact that the ASP.NET team owns the whole stack from design-time to runtime gives a much more coherant experience. I also think that the sheer number of Java IDEs means that Java developers either need to learn more than one IDE (and deal with the difference in approach), or go without in some areas."

This says a lot to me about the culture of Microsoft and how it differs from the culture of Sun (and open systems in general). There is a reason why there are so many IDE's and its called "competition". Its not that developers want or need to learn more than one IDE, but different developers work in different ways. JEdit is lightweight. NetBeans and Eclipse are more feature-rich through their plugin architectures. IntelliJ is a coders tool (IMHO). Sun Java Studio Creator is for the corporate developer. And at each of the developer skill levels there is competition for market share.

Perhaps the question shouldn't be "why are there so many Java IDE's" but "Why aren't there more .NET IDE's?" I'll give you my take on why there are so many java IDEs. Because Java is an open platform defined through the Java Community Process. There is value to Microsoft in owning the API and the tool. They own the experience ... and windows, and the directory server, and the proprietary protocols, and the security vulnerabilities that come with them. That's OK, that's their business model. There isn't much value in that for Sun, IBM, IDEA, Borland, Oracle, etc. Microsoft has an unfair advantage on Windows because they own the stack, always has and probably will for a long time. As an IDE vendor, why would I want to compete with that? In addition, I have to buy into Windows, and Active Directory, proprietary protocols. and the security vulnerabilities. As the IDE vendor, if I want to support .NET, what's in it for me?