Oracle has decided to let NetBeans die

Has Oracle done anything, anything at all, without angering at least part of the Java community? Take the recent ugly row over Hudson, which led to the departure of the lead developer. Even the biggest optimists can see that Oracle couldn’t care less about a community, but some decisions make no sense at all in the long run. Dropping Ruby on Rails support from NetBeans is one of them. I can’t get my head around it. Borůvek, for instance, sees nothing but advantages, positives and certainties in it. Oracle has backed the wrong horse, unless it’s decided to let NetBeans die.

I understand that you probably can’t run a company as amateurishly as Sun did. Look at the three years of agony over JavaFX. But you couldn’t deny that Sun at least tried to innovate. Oracle, by contrast, is a corporation where nothing innovative could ever happen. In that light, axing Rails support makes perfect sense. Oracle’s strategic priorities are Java and JEE, and IDE support for them. Why spend limited resources on Ruby on Rails? At first glance there’s no reason. Look at what’s happening in software development around us, though, and it’s less clear.

It reminds me of five years ago, when Spring was the poor relation everyone laughed at in the JEE world. Today the situation is precisely the reverse. So who’s next to radically change how people think about building web applications in Java? I’m convinced it’ll be Ruby and Ruby on Rails for most small and midsize businesses.

That’s why dropping a technology like Ruby on Rails from the IDE makes no sense to me. The argument that Rails has nothing to do with Java doesn’t hold up. What about JRuby? Java and Rails can already interoperate at the JVM level. So what’s the problem?

I could be wrong, but Oracle has backed the wrong horse. JEE gives it a reliable pool of users. Rails could have given it something strategically important for the future. The move makes sense in the short term. Looking further ahead, suppose Rails didn’t become the next key technology. How many resources would it have cost to keep supporting it? Once that train gets moving, Oracle won’t catch it.

I wish the NetBeans team no ill, but with this move and the ones likely to follow, Oracle is consigning NetBeans to a slow death in obscurity.