Development Without Frontiers
By Michiel de Bruijn
Although Java is a great cross-platform language, most of its major integrated development environments (IDEs) run only on Windows. (For a notable exception, read this month's review of Inprise/Borland's JBuilder.) This has forced developers on other platforms to do their visual design using souped-up text editors, which leaves a prime market opportunity for an enterprising IDE vendor.
Sun, the driving force behind Java and a nonfollower of anything Microsoft, certainly has tried to serve the non-Windows IDE market, but so far has been spectacularly unsuccessful. Sun's first attempt at a native development tool, Java Workshop 1.0, was so slow and bug-ridden that most developers never took the trouble to figure out even the most basic features of the product.
Version 2.0 did a lot better in the speed department, but due to its rather unique approach to the development process, it still didn't exactly manage to attract a huge following. Another product released at about the same time, Java Studio 1.0, showed lots of promise from a visual-design perspective—enough to make analysts wonder whether this could be the long-awaited "Visual Basic for Java" but it lacked the most basic development facilities (like a source-code editor) and was largely ignored as well.
The Choice of a Free Generation
By the end of 1999, lackluster customer response had convinced Sun to pretty much axe its previous technologies. Instead, it acquired an enterprising small development outfit located in the Czech republic, NetBeans, which had been enjoying some success in the Linux world with its NetBeans Developer development environment.
