Re: Discussion About Community Contributions to NetBeans

I would like to expand the scope regarding why community submissions
are not as high as would ideally be the case to include plugins, and
not just the core ide functionality and the plugins that are delivered
as part of the releases.

After all, what I'm seeing is that it's not unusual for something
that's considered 'core' in one or more releases is no longer 'in' and
is spun out to the community to move forward with.

My experience of late is that this means that within a release or so
(after being dropped from the core), the plugin fails to keep up with
the pace of releases that the core ide has, and seemingly never catches
up.

eg: Visual Web designer for JSF.

Assuming that (Visual Web) got spun out to the community, where can it
be obtained from for use with Netbeans 7.0.x?

perhaps it is out there somewhere, and I'm just poorly informed.

but, the concern is that when a plugin does get spun off, is there a
good body of documentation (not just the exposed api, but also the
internal design) available so that people that are not intimately
familiar with it's internal workings (essentially everyone other than
the set of developers that created it) are going to be able to get to
grips with maintaining these plugins?

As much as there is a mentoring program that's going to be available
for first time patch contributors, how about something like that for
these plugins that get spun off, but in terms of providing
documentation for everyone else whose lap it has now landed in.

From my standpoint, it's not always well advertised ahead of time that
a given chunk of netbeans core functionality is going to be spun off,
it suggests that this level of documentation should be a living set of
documentation that's always there.

when a technology is deemed to have become outdated or for other
reasons unable to be kept in the release bundle, there are still many
applications out there that were built using those toolsets, and by not
having at least the same level of functionality in subsequent
iterations of NetBeans (either as core or add-on), effectively limits
me from advancing to the latest and greatest.

The trickle down is that the production environment then gets locked
into a particular set of toolsets and version of glassfish (for
example) and can not be upgraded without huge amount of time due to the
re-engineering away from the abandoned toolsets.

This in turn means we have multiple versions of netbeans, multiple
development platforms with instances of glassfish, multiple versioned
production platforms, and it quickly turns into something that is not
coherent.

If a toolset such as Visual Web is to go away and be replaced by
something else, a tool that can help with the import / uplift of the
existing code to the new technology would help ease this issue.  If
done well, it would make things such that the issues to be sorted out
are much reduced compared to having to start from scratch.

I hope that you look at the issues I raise as opportunities rather than
complaints.

I most certainly do appreciate and value the fact that NetBeans is
there, and is progressing as result of the efforts of those involved at
all levels.

But, the issues I raise are significant issues that should ideally
receive the attention they deserve in helping allow the users of
NetBeans to keep up with it's progress.

I hope that this will stimulate some discussion and some positive
outcomes.

best regards,
peter belbin.