Lenz Grimmer's blog

With IntelliJ now being available under an Open Source license, developers have another option to choose from when it comes to Java-based IDEs/Frameworks (Eclipse and NetBeans being the other two prominent ones). Choice is always good, and being an Open Source enthusiast, I of course welcome JetBrain's move!

However, as I'm not really a heavy GUI-based IDE user myself, I can't really comment on which one is the best. These kind of discussions tend to turn into a Holy War anyway... In the end it's likely that each of them gets the job done and you have to come to your own conclusions, based on your personal preference and requirements.

I personally would be interested in seeing how their support for PHP or Python compares to the one in NetBeans. Their plugin repository lists more that 560 plugins, including many for database connectivity/modeling/navigation (incl. support for MySQL). I'm also glad to see that they have a plugin for Bazaar, something that I'm desperately missing from NetBeans!

Interestingly, they decided to keep a few parts proprietary, it's going to be interesting to see how this will turn out for them and if developers will be willing to pay for these extra features, considering that most of this is available for free from the other two projects.

Their Contributor License Agreement looks like it has been derived from the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA), which is always nice to see. I assume this can be attributed to Roman Strobl - I was positively surprised to notice that he joined their team as a technology evangelist in June! Roman did a great job in spreading the NetBeans and OpenSolaris gospel at Sun before and I briefly met him at this year's FOSDEM conference in Brussels. Congratulations!

Long time no blogging! I hope PlanetMySQL finally picks up my posts again, I really miss the additional audience

We recently received a request from the OpenISR project about adding the Eclipse public license to our FLOSS License Exception. As it turns out, it is almost identical to the Common Public License (CPL), which was already included in the exception. So the decision was fairly easy - version 0.6 of the FLOSS License Exception now also covers the Eclipse public license.

What is the FLOSS License exception all about anyway? Our intent:

We want specified Free/Libre and Open Source Software applications to be able to use specified GPL-licensed MySQL client libraries despite the fact that not all FLOSS licenses are compatible with version 2 of the GNU General Public License.

In other words, we want to make it possible for more non-GPL applications that are licensed under any of the listed OSI-approved licenses to link against the MySQL client libraries. The term exception may be misleading here, what it really does is widen the scope of the client license and make it more compatible to applications that are not under the GPL.

Last week I was notified that my article about how to install and configure MySQL and the MySQL Connector/J was published in the Java Starter Magazine, a special edition of the german Java Magazin. It covers the basic installation of MySQL and Connector/J on Windows and Linux and how to write a small example program to connect to to MySQL with Java using the Eclipse framework. They were kind enough to send me a number of copies that I plan to give away at tonight's Hamburg MySQL User Group Meeting.

The JAX Innovation Award is intended to honour and recognise the most remarkable and outstanding European contributions in the world of Java and Eclipse. These contributions can include products, open source projects, ideas, concepts, publications, or break-through technological innovations. What's your most favourite innovation or project?

You can submit your proposal online or by downloading and filling out forms provided from this page. The winner can win a 10kEUR prize, which will be presented during the JAX, Enterprise Architecture, and Eclipse Forum Europe conferences, which all take place in parallel on May 8th-12th in Wiesbaden, Germany.