NetBeans Project Jackpot Follow

Oh look, they're missing out on Inspection Gadgets, Intention Power
Pack, and Metrics Reloaded.... those poor guys....

They're not that poor :). They have the choice to switch :).

I can't help but wonder if it'd be any use having some form of reuse in
these types of things... We have Psi, they're gonna have some form of
AST based layer... Nah, we can't share can we...

Of course we can't.
That's why it's called: "disruptive innovation" :).

Ahmed.

I've been following Jackpot as closely as possible, given the relative lack of information available. As near as I can determine, there's absolutely nothing in it that wasn't in stock IDEA 4.5 + MetricsReloaded, with the exception of James Gosling's name and Sun's marketing budget. A lot of what they are trumpeting as innovative dates back at least two years, to IDEA 4.0 days, and had non-productized precursors going back nearly a decade earlier.

Now the collaborative development stuff that's coming for NetBeans, that actually looks somewhat innovative.

--Dave Griffith

Dave Griffith wrote on 22/08/05 12:28:

Now the collaborative development stuff that's coming for NetBeans,
that actually looks somewhat innovative.

It also sounds like the sort of features you'd mentioned you'd love to
thought about for IDEA 6.

One of the guys on a local NZ java list mentioned again how "Java IDEs
have become a commodity", surely this just means IDE designers have a
challenge to face....

>It also sounds like the sort of features you'd mentioned you'd love to
>thought about for IDEA 6.

I do my little part to keep the best software product in existence ahead of the technology curve.

>One of the guys on a local NZ java list mentioned again how "Java IDEs
>have become a commodity", surely this just means IDE >designers have a challenge to face....

A commodity where you can pay $495 for the best, or two different sorts of $0 for half-decent-but-not-actually-objectionable. Weird market indeed.

I've read your stuff for over a year and a half, now, and had no idea you were a kiwi. These are the days of miracles and wonder...

--Dave Griffith

Dave Griffith wrote on 23/08/05 13:52:

I've read your stuff for over a year and a half,

And I've not bored you senseless and garnered a killfile entry? w00t ;)

you were a kiwi. These are the days of miracles and wonder...

Here be hobbits :) ( and yes, a family member DID work on the movies.
My brothers wife was doing makeup. ).

Heh

that actually looks somewhat innovative.

Don't you consider the Matisse project]]> as somewhat innovative, too? Just being curious :)

Hmm sorry for HTML...

Um, well, no.

Now don't get me wrong, it seems like a very nicely polished product, with extremly nice ergonomics. I'd be happy to use it, if it were bundled with an acceptable IDE.

But innovative, no. Or more precisely, not that I could tell from the demo. I didn't see anything there that I wasn't happily using a decade ago in InterfaceBuilder, and little that wasn't available even earlier in Delphi. That's not quite fair. There's some clever stuff with defaults that make it seem like layout is DWIW. Nice, I suppose, but I'd have to use it a lot to trust it. The layout model for InterfaceBuilder was simple, clear, codeless, and surprise-free.

In short, a good step forward, and I'm glad to see that this sort of thing is finally getting to Java, but don't go running to the patent office just yet.

--Dave Griffith

I 've been in the Jackpot presentation at JavaOne this year. And to be honest, it didn't look impressive at all. Don't know wether they made some improvements in the meantime. All I could see was ... Uhh... We can do a find usages. ... Uhh ... We don't reformat the whole file, we work on a slick portion of source only. ... And yes, we started working on it years ago.

Two major issues where raised by the audience within minutes, both because Jackpot heavily relies on javac:

- It seemed Jackpot will fail on partially broken sources.
- There was no support for comments nor other source file types than java.

Jens