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Bug 222316 - Competitive Scala Support
Summary: Competitive Scala Support
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: contrib
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Scala (show other bugs)
Version: 7.2
Hardware: All All
: P3 normal (vote)
Assignee: _ dcaoyuan
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2012-11-17 17:40 UTC by fommil
Modified: 2012-11-18 18:43 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:
Issue Type: ENHANCEMENT
Exception Reporter:


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Description fommil 2012-11-17 17:40:19 UTC
A Scala plugin for Netbeans was written in 2008 as part of the NetBeans Innovators Grant contest:

 http://wiki.netbeans.org/GrantProjectsStatus


Since then, Scala has grown incredibly fast and is making an impact in the big data and financial services worlds. Meanwhile, the Netbeans plugin has become vapourware: major unresolved bugs, incomplete feature set and beyond the capability/patience of most users to install.


This is an RFE for the Netbeans committee to consider Scala support as strategic: as a major target for the Netbeans IDE.

This will involve playing catchup with the two major competitors in this area and overtake them:

* Scala Eclipse (endorsed by Scala author Martin Odersky)
* IntelliJ IDEA (with 300,000+ registered downloads of this plugin alone).


It is really worth pointing out that IDEA have included the Scala plugin as part of their new Community Edition (free license) and it is winning a lot of Netbeans users as a result – myself included (I even bought an IntelliJ IDEA license as I want an IDE solution for both Java Enterprise and Scala).


Although the Eclipse and IDEA plugins are actively maintained (and superior to the Netbeans plugin in every way) there is still room for improvement:

1. the Scala community has moved on from Maven to SBT, but neither Eclipse nor IDEA natively support SBT projects.

2. there is now a Scala compiler tree library, but timing meant that IDEA/Eclipse rolled their own support. Using the official compiler tree would mean that syntax support for multiple versions of Scala would be much better.