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January 20, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Oracle's NetBeans commitment in question

TAGS: Application Development

Oracle appears to be taking a don't-call-me, I'll-call-you approach to the Sun Microsystems-led NetBeans open source tools initiative.

In a joint presentation featuring Oracle and Sun Microsystems on January 10, Oracle acknowledged the importance of NetBeans, something that Sun officials were quick to herald. But that endorsement, however, does not necessarily mean Oracle has any plans to develop anything based on NetBeans.

FWIW, there seems to be some confusion as to what exactly Oracle's endorsement means, if anything.

Sun President Jonathan Schwartz in his blog this week champions Oracle's backing of NetBeans.

"We also announced Oracle's adoption and endorsement of NetBeans - building on the groundswell of support we're seeing for NetBeans 5.0," Schwartz said.

But Oracle's Thomas Kurian, who is senior vice president of server technologies at the company, dismissed the notion that Oracle has any concrete plans for NeBeans.

"We certainly think Sun's NetBeans initiative is important in the marketplace, and we're watching it very closely. But as of right now, Oracle is focused on JDeveloper and Eclipse and we have no plans to adopt either NetBeans or any of its technology. Any statements to the contrary by anyone else in the industry are not true," Kurian said in an entry on Oracle's Web site this week

An Oracle representative on Friday reiterated that Oracle is watching NetBeans closely but is focused on the rival Eclipse open source tools initiative as well as on Oracle's own JDeveloper Java tool.

Asked last week what exactly were Oracle's plans for NetBeans, Timothy Cramer, director of the NetBeans program at Sun, said the companies were exploring what Oracle might do with NetBeans.

Right now, it appears Oracle's NetBeans endorsement may not mean much after all.

In another development in open source, a project called the AJAX Toolkit Framework (ATF) is cited on Eclipse's Web site. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript plus XML) is gathering steam as a technology for building Web applications.

The IBM-led effort at Eclipse purports to "provide extensible frameworks and exemplary tools for building IDEs for the many different AJAX runtime offerings (Dojo, Zimbra, etc) in the market."

Posted by Paul Krill on January 20, 2006 04:23 PM

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