Question for those in the know: I had expected NetBeans development to stall after Oracle took over Sun - after all, there's not really any direct profit coming from it. My understanding of Oracle is that they mostly think along the lines of "no direct profit = no investment".
I think it's more a perception problem with Oracle.
They've actually been fantastic for the Java platform and have been so for nearly a decade now i.e. even before the Sun acquisition. It's hard to dispute that the JVM is thriving right now with plenty of innovation amongst the various languages. And most of us were really happy to have their JRockit work (especially G1GC) embedded back into the core runtime when they could have continued to charge for it.
And people need to ask if things are really so bad with their OSS projects e.g. OpenOffice, MySQL, DTrace etc. Sure they have tightened control over copyrights but it's not like they have actively screwed their customers if anything the projects seem in a lot better shape.
Not sure what you mean by "much" faster. Most of the benchmarks have fractional differences. I think comparing an Apple only, commercial program, to a free and open source multi-platform program, VirtualBox would "win" for a lot of people, because it's not just about benchmarks.
NB has a life of its own within Oracle. And since the product is fully Open Source, sponsoring companies carried on supporting it, even after Oracle acquired Sun.
Moreover, Java is worth nothing without people developing in Java. They need a good IDE. Hence, Oracle needs a good IDE. Oracle surely won't complain that partners sponsor NB, since it reduces this necessary cost of doing business.
Even before Oracle acquired Sun and therefore Java, they had some excellent free tools they developed and which kept getting better. For example, SQL Developer.
I've been pleasantly surprised by Oracle's stewardship of Java. They actually succeeded in getting the further development back on track, after it seemed to have descended into a quagmire in Sun's last years.
nothing in that list of new features jumps out at me. and in terms of javascript support it looks like things are still worse than nb7.2 (they gutted their language model because of licensing concerns and the new model is terrible). they've added some bells and whistles, but still don't have the basics working (ie, JsDocs, which provide the typing info for javascript)
so i'm still using nb7.2 (and purchased webstorm for javascript). i've been using (and loving) netbeans for 7 years, but from my pov, the project appears stalled (even though they're putting lots of work into it)
Why does it keep getting better?