What about Java tools in general? It's often said that Java is sophisticated, but programming is difficult to learn. Where do you think Java tools should be heading right now?
One of the big challenges people in the tools area have is that if you look at the developer population, there is incredible diversity in both the level of sophistication of the developer and in the level of sophistication of the things they are building.
When you try to build an IDE (integrated development environment) that is all things to all people -- which is kind of what a traditional IDE does or tries to do -- you end up with something terribly complicated, because it has lots of features for lots of different things. It may not actually do any of them terrifically well, because you are focusing on a lot of different things.
And so whenever you pick a direction, you know you end up deciding to not go in other directions. So IDEs tend to get focused, and one of the interesting ways to look at the different IDEs and different IDE extensions is that they all focus on different specialisations of the market.
So, for instance, one of my favourite IDEs out there is called BlueJ. It's really nice, but it is extremely specialised. It is designed to help in teaching people who have never programmed before, and it comes with, you know, a textbook and the rest of it, and there is this large community of high schools and universities and middle schools that all use this thing.
There is a developer community that they created. It is all over the world, and it is probably the most carefully simple IDE out there, but it is extremely specialised, because it is all about the educational process. You also find people in IDEs that are all about things like cellphones.
There is a lot going on in Java tools now, from companies like BEA and Sun, which are trying to make tools easier for programmers. From a competitive perspective, what is Sun's special sauce? How are you trying to get some share from competitors?
This is one of these areas that is a little awkward for us, because we sort of wear two hats.
As stewards and members of the Java community, we are big believers in diversity, and the fact that there are multiple competitors in the market -- that's a really good thing. That said, we also have our own products, and we want to win.
I think that in NetBeans, we have a really excellent IDE. We have been getting a lot of very good reviews based on it. The pre-release reviews on Java Studio Creator were very positive. So we are very pretty excited with the way that is going, and we are really pretty excited with the way these things are going to evolve (against competitors). It's going to be entertaining.
