Roumen's Weblog

NetBeans "out-of-the-boxness" vs. Plug-ins and Community Needs

Peter Thomas posted seven reasons why he thinks people should try NetBeans if they use another IDE. Funny thing is that he compares the download size (NetBeans = 58 MB, Eclipse = 103 MB), right in the time when we switched to JDK 5 and the download size went down to 35.6 MB for daily 6.0 builds ;). Somebody says that perhaps Eclipse supports more features in this SDK download package. While this is probably true for basic editing features, notice that NetBeans supports in this small download full set of tools for web development and EE development, GUI editor Matisse and other features for which you need plug-ins in Eclipse.

I agree very much with this statement from comments: What matters most is which tool are you productive in. Download and install, pure or not, profiler or not, plugins or not, once you get everything set up - which one do you get more work done in. This appears to vary from person to person.

That's why we work hard on making the IDE productive out-of-the-box, which means you download the IDE (or an additional pack such as mobility, the profiler, preview of C/C++ pack or the enterprise pack depending on what applications you want to build). Then you have all the tools you need to get your job done. All the features are well integrated, documented and tested (yes we do have a QA department and community testing called NetCAT where people from community help us with testing).

On the other hand, if you need plug-ins for other frameworks such as hibernate, there exist plug-ins which help you achieve that.

Actually nowadays people write many NetBeans plug-ins and I think we came to the point when it's really important to make sure there exists a centralized repository of all plug-ins. By a repository I mean a list of all available plug-ins, with description, screenshots, rating, comments, an update center, download link and a link to the source code. nbextras.org is closest to this list, but it contains rather "incubation" plug-ins, while mature plug-ins are hosted on netbeans.org.

I don't know what is the ultimate solution but perhaps what we need at least is a commonly known wiki page with a list of all plug-ins, information about them and how to get them. The wiki page would then list all NetBeans plug-ins and people would be able to keep it up-to-date easily. It should include:

• Plug-ins in the official netbeans.org plug-in catalogue
• Various commercial plug-ins (if not listed on netbeans.org)
• Plug-ins available on nbextras.org
• Plug-ins available via various update centers
• Any other plug-ins :)

I believe this could make things a bit less enthropic than they are right now. Supposing of course people would be using this wiki page and it would be well known and easily accessible and updatable. What do you think - is this the right solution or not? Remember the best solutions are often simple, and wiki is simple.

What else does NetBeans community need next to a wiki site (in my opinion)? Good online forums where developers can discuss about various topics (perhaps this forum should be integrated with the nbusers mailing list... is that a good idea?). The other thing we need is a list of documentation resources. Something like Sang's master index, but updatable by anyone. So it should be a wiki page.

Well, that's it for my wishes... is there anything we could use in the community which would make us happier? Central wiki and online forums would be a good start, I think.