Winston Prakash's Weblog at http://blogs.sun.com/winston/entry/creator_vs_vwp explores the relationship between these almost-twin products.
Which product is more important to you? Do you want both? What if Creator's innovative features were simply merged into NetBeans? Let's consider what futures are possible. Winston's Weblog got the discussion started. We're starting this forum thread to bring more users into the conversation. Read the blog, reply to this thread, and let us know what direction you'd like to see for Creator and/or VWP development.
Hi,
I've used Creator for 2 years as well, and i'm beginning to be thrilled with it. Phenomenal job...thanks Creator team!
Have not switched to VWP yet, waiting for it to get some good reviews, and stabilize. I'd really like to do that, though, to avoid switching back and forth between 2 IDEs, and get all the benefits of Netbeans.
Going forward, I think VWP+NB is the right direction. I think Creator should be completely merged into Netbeans, and the sooner the better.
We don't want to have to track two different products, not knowing which one to choose or migrate to or from. Also, being a software engineer myself, I feel having one codebase is really important, so all energy is focussed there, instead of having to support two versions of it.
Simply speaking, the overlap between JSC & VWP is so huge, that it makes very little sense to continue both. Keeping both products alive would create an ovehead for both the product team, and the developement community.
Also, I believe phasing out JSC, would move a lot of people over to Netbeans, growing the Netbeans community, and also improving Netbeans as a platform.
The creator community would become the VWP community, JSC product would become VWP, and both the product and the community could retain it's individual character, and leverage Netbeans as well as drive Netbeans towards greater heights!
So, I say, let's move on to VWP + Netbeans. And let's work to make that the best web app developement platform!
For more information on the differences between Java Studio Creator
and Visual Web Pack for NetBeans 5.5, see Winston's article at
http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/javatools/jscreator/reference/techart/2/creator_vwp.html
I have been using Java Studio Creator for more than a year now. Before that I have mostly used Eclipse or sometimes IBM's Rational IDE (which is also based on Eclipse, but costs about $10K for full featured version -- Rational Software Architect). I have also worked with VisualStudio.Net IDE in the past for ASP.Net apps. Here are my thoughts:
1. In the ASP/.Net world, you don't have to worry much picking and choosing the best IDE. VS.Net is pretty much the best out there for ASP/.Net/Windows world. However, in case of Java world, there are too many choices with too many IDEs, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. For example, JSC is the best for web applications, but its does not provide J2EE features available in Eclipse/NetBeans. Eclipse has the most market share and has tons of plug-ins, but there is nothing better out there than NetBean's profiler. Rational has its own strengths with most of the configurations done visually (i.e visual editing of web.xml, and other config files), excellent data and business modeling, but its JSF and visual web development support is pathetic. I just downloaded the latest and greatest version, Rational Software Architect 7.0 - which was released a month ago - and it still lags far behind JSC for visual web development and server based events. The bottom line is that there is no one Java IDE that is as good as VisualStudio.Net is for ASP/Windows world -- if they start supporting cross platform, i.e JSF and J2EE, I will migrate to it right away.
2. I was an Eclipse user, and JSC caught my attention and it made me explore NetBeans. Now I am evaluating NetBeans with visual web pack to possibly switch to NetBeans. I think merging JSC and NetBeans has can potentially switch many developers to NetBeans. It will result in increase in NetBean's market share for Java IDE and make it less confusing for developers to figure out which IDE to use.
However, in case of Java world, there are too
many choices with too many IDEs, each with its own
strengths and weaknesses
Yes, Sabir, choice and competition are bad. Why should I have to pick and choose the best tools with which I will develop my application? I wish Sun or IBM would just dictate everything to me. Freedom of choice just makes my head hurt.
I've been using Visual Studio 2005 for the past year, and although some things in it are better than JSC (themes in JSC suck), it is, in general, a steaming pile... that's just my opinion.
Maybe someday VS will have support for proper refactoring more powerful editor (like Eclipse) easy cross browser functionality development(sure, it can be done, but they throw enough little things in there to 'get you' where it becomes difficult) Wider selection of default components (where are tabs?) integration with Subversion / CVS unit testing (that doesn't cost an arm and a leg) easy documentation generator like javadoc proper intellisense that tells me when methods are deprecated ability to view hierarchical information about a particular class ability to easily search and fine a particular class (like eclipse does it) ability to clean up my imports ability to run/develop on something other than windows
I could keep listing it's deficiencies, but I grow weary.
I look at the differences between JSC and VWP a bit differently I guess.
I see them as one code base (at least in the future I hope) with two different developer types as their audience, and packaged to meet those developer audiences.
JSC is great for developers that work in a shop that tells the developer, "Here, connect a GUI on top of these Web Services and EJB's". The developer doesn't have the need to write WS code or EJB code, just to be able to quickly drop a GUI on top of someone elses code.
Now for VWP, this works best in a shop were everything is done by the same developers. They have to write EJB's today, WS tomorrow, and maybe slap a quick prototype GUI on the whole thing while they are at it, or even polish up the GUI for the final project.
These two developer types are no different then what has existed in the WWW development world for years. The HTML designer would toss a form back to the CGI guy ( that only worked at night and didn't want to talk to other people ;-) ) for connecting the HTML to the backend databases and such.
I am very happy with NetBeans and the VWP plugin. As I am currently looking at collaborating with another developer who will use JPA, we can easily both use NetBeans to work on projects together.
This would not be quite so simple if we worked on separate IDEs, which would be necessary if I continued to use Creator.
I also love the JBoss deployment I get with NetBeans as that is our target.
Right now, the biggest deficiency with VWP plugin is that it does not support portlet development. Other than that, it appears to have nearly all of the functionality of JSC.
The Netbeans site is best place to find answers to VWP questions. I searched netbeans.org for "portlet", drilled into the search results, and found the JSF Portlet Builder is planned for Netbeans 6.0. At http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/Development under Planning see the NB6FeaturesTBD page. This page lists features that are planned, but their place on the overall NB 6.0 schedule is TBD.
I love the features offered by the JSC2.1 , however as some of you have rightly pointed out , it make no sense to continue with the development of jsc2 espcially if both JSC2 and VWP are trying to acheive or offer the same functionality .
Let pool all the resources together to work on the VWP as I think it would be much easier to offer the VWP as an add on, encompass the functionality and user friendly of modern GUI (JSC2)
to keep abreast with the java technology development for the benenfit of java community.
I look at the differences between JSC and VWP a bit
differently I guess.
I see them as one code base (at least in the future I
hope) with two different developer types as their
audience, and packaged to meet those developer
audiences.
JSC is great for developers that work in a shop that
tells the developer, "Here, connect a GUI on top of
these Web Services and EJB's". The developer doesn't
have the need to write WS code or EJB code, just to
be able to quickly drop a GUI on top of someone elses
code.
Now for VWP, this works best in a shop were
everything is done by the same developers. They have
to write EJB's today, WS tomorrow, and maybe slap a
quick prototype GUI on the whole thing while they are
at it, or even polish up the GUI for the final
project.
These two developer types are no different then what
has existed in the WWW development world for years.
The HTML designer would toss a form back to the CGI
guy ( that only worked at night and didn't want to
talk to other people ;-) ) for connecting the HTML
to the backend databases and such.
I believe peppertech has it right. As one of the "rave" tool developers, there will be one engineering team working on one code base. In the future, "Creator" may be a specially packaged version of "NetBean VWP". As I understand it, the plan is to attempt to add Creator features to NetBeans.
For those that want to try VWP, I tried to distill the install instructions to a recommended configuration similar to what an all-in-one download of Creator would provide. See http://blogs.sun.com/edwingo/entry/installing_netbeans_5_5_visual.
"Rave" is the code name of the team that wrote "Creator" and now "NetBeans VWP".
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