back to article Oracle spurns Ruby devs for Java love

Ruby-on-Rails, once an exciting Web 2.0 language flirted with by Sun Microsystems, has no future at Oracle. The database giant is ending all support for RoR in the NetBeans IDE it inherited from Sun through its acquisition. Support will cease as of January 27, with the RoR module removed from development builds of NetBeans IDE …

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  1. Brian 39
    IT Angle

    Or the other way round?

    One could also suggest that so few people are bothering with Sun ^H^H^H Oracle software environments now and are using something else... but no. Lets not rain on Big Larry's parade.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    "Oracle spurns Ruby devs for Java love"

    How very narrow and foolish.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      Narrow, Foolish

      Come on, it's Oracle. Those two words fit well to most things they do

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pity

    Pity, as I'd rather use NetBeans than Eclipse any day of the week.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Eclipse

      Interesting - *so* many people are using Eclipse in the corporate world (indeed, IBM based their IDE on it) - I'm curious, why do people like/use NetBeans ?

      1. dotdavid
        Thumb Up

        Why do people use NetBeans

        As a Java dev who used to main code .NET I find NetBeans quite similar in design layout to Visual Studio so it is easy to pick up. To me, Eclipse is a confusing pile of obscure menus, weird hotkey-combinations and plugins and while I do use it for Android stuff (mainly because the Android plugins are all for Eclipse) I don't much like it. I suspect that people only really use Eclipse because they always have done so know all the tricks and quirks, and can stand the muddle because it has grown up around them.

        The other main thing for me is that NetBeans has proper Apache Maven integration which is useful. Can't believe Eclipse still doesn't, to be honest.

        1. Greg J Preece

          nbAndroid

          Not as good as the Google-developed Eclipse plugin, but there is a Netbeans plugin for Android, and it's improving all the time. I've coded up several bits on it and it's competent enough.

  4. Tom 7

    Doesnt Ruby have its own IDE

    I thought the whole point of writing in a fantastic new language that makes everything so much better and easier and faster and better mean they can knock up a NetJewels in ruby in an afternoon.

    I've got a javascript editor written in javascript if someone wants to start an HTML5 IDE...

  5. Sabine Miehlbradt
    FAIL

    Damn

    Right when I had just completed the switch-over from Eclipse to NetBeans. Is anyone already forking NetBeans (and updating the UML plugin)? It's not like I do RoR - but I can recognize when a company is trying to run one of their own projects into the ground to get rid of it.

    I wonder what Oracle will do to MySQL - May be time to look at postgresql for the new shop.

    Oracle is probably trying to get rid of some of the Sun legacy projects to "trim some fat" and "streamline the company profile".

  6. E 2

    Oracle is trying to monetize Java

    So why would it care about other languages?

  7. Nathan 6

    Don't Blame Them

    Oracle is a business, and from what I can tell it makes little sense for them to keep funding stuff that's not their priority.

    It's simple, if you a RoR person use another IDE, I hear Emacs is really popular with a lot of those users. Also, if people really want it supported in Netbeans, then they can add it in themselves, after all it's open source.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    But what next for Java ?

    Makes sense to ditch RoR as I suspect NetBeans is actually used by that many RoR developers. The big question is how much longer are we going to have to put up with the crippled, bloated dinosaur of Java for enterprise development ?

    At least Ruby had some modern features and elegance and allowed productivity through higher level abstractions. It's a dynamic language though which is bad.

    We need Java to develop into something modern like C# has. Better still why don't Oracle just bring something like Haskell to the JVM and Netbeans.

  9. Spongibrain
    Thumb Up

    that just leaves us with PHP, Python, Groovy, Scala, Clojure (and Java) then

    Plenty of languages left...

    1. Spongibrain

      ooh not forgetting Erlang and Prolog

      ...

      and CaML

      wow !

    2. Brian 39
      Badgers

      Uh oh....

      Don't give Larry and co any ideas... ;-)

  10. Guus Leeuw
    FAIL

    Remember me on this computer!

    Quote:

    "Oracle has blamed a lack of scarce resources (...)"

    Isn't that supposed to mean something along the lines of there being plenty of resources?

    A lack of something: some is scarce

    scarce resources: a lack of resources

    A lack of scarce resources thusly means a lack of a lack of resources. And that, by any means, means that resources are aplenty.

    Editor / Journalist... Please read before posting....

    Equally:

    * when the paper (The Economist) has an article with a linguistic error, I stop reading that article.

    * when an executive manager churns out garbled emails, I stop reading them emails

    * Writing about a developers' environment, and thus, by a stretch, writing about a language kind of makes me think that language is important enough!

    Guus

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Troll

    Meh

    I was one of those who bought a book on RoR. Now we use PHP/CodeIgniter, Python, node.js/Express... Anything but RoR really, it's a bit slow and the world has moved on.

    But if you insist on RoR, just use RubyMine.

  12. Peter Ford
    Thumb Down

    First...

    ... they came for the Ruby developers, but I didn't mind - I was working in PHP...

    1. Havin_it
      Alert

      ^This!

      I dearly hope they don't go down the same road with the PHP support, which has really flourished in a short period and made NB my PHP editor of choice. It's the only one I've tried yet that handles a script containing PHP, HTML, JS and CSS without the features you want from a full-fat editor (completion, folding, syntax highlighting) crapping out on one or all of the above. Autoformat templates are dead easy to hack on too, to accommodate my personal style quirks. It's also faster than anything else I've used on find-in-files and class/namespace completion in large projects, even on a measly 1st-gen Atom.

      I tried to like Eclipse, but it was too much effort just to glue together the right grab-bag of components for my desired workflow (and keep them glued through upgrades) - life's too short.

      If this behaviour starts to look like snowballing, I sincerely hope there will be enough committed developers to fork it. Oracle must be getting used to it by now ;)

    2. Greg J Preece

      I agree!

      The PHP support in NetBeans over the past few years has turned into something awesome, and it's become my main PHP editor, not least because I was already using it for Java. It also supports a slew of other front-end web languages, including JS/jQuery, in ways that have made my life much easier. Losing support for those things would be a real blow.

      Eclipse, by comparison, is a confusing clusterfuck. I could never get into using it, though I know a lot of people do. NetBeans just makes more sense to me, and the rest of the tech team here agree

      I imagine the RoR support will simply be resurrected as a module. Can they get hold of the core NetBeans code and turn it into one? If "removed" means "turned into a user-maintained module", then that's not so bad. Some of the contributed modules are excellent - just started using Foxbeans last week for some Mozilla development and it's great.

  13. JGW Maxwell
    FAIL

    NetBeans

    As a RoR developer, I can safely say that this won't affect my life even 1%. I don't think a single RoR developer uses NetBeans - mainly because it is slow, clunky and eats resources like they are going out of fashion.

    Coda/TextMate/gEdit/Vim are where RoR development belongs, or if you want something heavier duty then Aptana Studio 3 is an excellent IDE for Ruby use, especially with its Heroku/EngineYard integration.

    This is a non-news story.

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