NetBeans Poll: Six Predictions for NetBeans in 2007

What does 2007 hold for NetBeans and Java? We have asked six NetBeans experts to look ahead and make predictions for 2007. Our subjects--two Evangelists, an Architect, an Editor, a Writer and a Community Manager--have different ideas on what they think is coming up on the horizon this year for NetBeans and the field of Java.

Read the predictions and then vote on the forecast you most agree with!

Gregg Sporar, NetBeans Evangelist

EJB3 and the Java Persistence API will gain even more momentum in 2007.

There are two things that will help drive this. First, more and more of the application servers will release versions that are compatible with Java EE 5. Second, the tools will continue to improve. To take just one example: as tool support for the Seam framework continues to improve, that will drive Seam adoption which in turn will help drive EJB3 adoption.

Jaroslav "Yarda" Tulach, NetBeans Architect

The biggest change in the Java world last year, and maybe also the IT market, was Java going open-source. I saw the momentum-there were thousands of people waiting for this to happen. The open-sourcing is likely to continue next year and I am really eager to see the outcome.

I expect that Java will be adopted by the Linux community and we will see a lot of Linux applications written in Java. I hope Java will be part of standard Linux distributions. I am convinced that the desktop integration of Java will get much better due to contribution of Linux communities. Java adoption is going to rise in unimaginable ways. I really cannot expect anything else more important for 2007 in the IT world than the results of open-sourcing Java. 

Bruno Souza, NetBeans Community Manager

2007 will be a year that Java and Sun will do a large leap in community participation.

Last year, Sun released many of its software solutions as open-source. We not only saw the announcement of the full Java platform (JME, JSE and JEE) to become open-source under the most recognized license, but also we had the final versions of Java SE 6 and Java EE 5, and both included many technologies and ideas that were born on the open-source community. All that activity will bring a strong positive reflection on the relationship between Sun and the developer community in 2007. Instead of investing efforts to donate code, Sun will invest in becoming a strong participant in the worldwide open-source community.

Geertjan Wielenga, NetBeans Writer

Scripting support in NetBeans is going to open the IDE to a whole bunch of new communities.

Roman Strobl, NetBeans Evangelist

NetBeans will again gain market share in year 2007.

NetBeans adoption has been accelerating during last two years and I predict that this trend will continue. The main reason for increased adoption will be features introduced in NetBeans 6.0 which will focus on increasing developer productivity. There will be many innovative features for desktop Java, support for scripting languages and much more.

Leonardo Galväo, Editor-in-Chief, NetBeans Magazine

With the open-sourcing of Sun's Java SE implementation, Java desktop APIs will increase in quality, performance and tool support.

Community collaboration will bring more eyes and hands around the core Java APIs. This will help solve deficiencies found in less-used but highly valued Java technologies such as Swing.

Vote for the prediction you agree with!

Poll closed. Results will be posted February 14th.

Proceed to the results...