Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, in this blog entry seems to indicate that NetBeans is a supported IDE for Android. This is what he specifically says:
I’d also like Sun to be the first platform software company to commit to a complete developer environment around the platform, as we throw Sun’s NetBeans developer platform for mobile devices behind the effort. We’ve obviously done a ton of work to support developers on all Java based platforms, and were pleased to add Google’s Android to the list.
But in the Android SDK announcement and documentation, Eclipse is the only supported IDE. There is no mention of NetBeans.
Where does this place what Jonathan said? Was he saying that Sun will build a NetBeans plugin for Andriod and release it on its own, or is he speculating that Google might add NetBeans support later? Maybe he was just hoping for some hype by association with a hot news (certainly not his style though)!
Given all the documentation that Google has provided for Android SDK, it should not be hard to build a NetBeans plugin for Android. But it is kind of a blow to Sun that Google chose to do its own Java VM implementation as well not support NetBeans as a supported IDE. Maybe Google didn’t like CDDL license.
Usually Jonathan’s blog gets mostly supportive and appreciative comments. But they just took it out on him for this entry.
Update: There seems to be a good amount of interest in using NetBeans for Android development. This is a good opportunity for the NetBeans community to step and fill the need.
Posted in Technology, mobile | Tags: Android, Google, NetBeans, Sun Microsystems
