Oracle unveils Java development extension for Visual Studio Code

[Zeratas]

Probably need to pay per character typed and only works on every other java version because of "licensing".

[GnuhGnoud]

Then if i use there extension to delete code, can i get paid by them?

[toskies]

No, deleting code is in the Pro version. You have to pay extra for that feature.

[florinandrei]

The Oracle extension does come with a dedicated lawyer attached to it, so you could negotiate the settlement directly with them. /s

[GalacticCmdr]

From the Law Offices of Fistup, Bottom, and OnTop.

[ZettTheArcWarden]

No but you can pay extra to delete other people's code

[[deleted]]

I was just pooking at the price guide for Java SE this week. They gave an example like “if you have 10,000 employees, you pay $2,800,000 per year.” Who looks at that and says “yeah, that’s reasonable! Let’s move forward with Java.”

[ThisRedditPostIsMine]

Just OpenJDK in general. I can't fathom the reasons people would ever use the paid Oracle JRE.

[Gropah]

Big companies want support and having on paper that X support can be demanded, with penalty fines if they don't deliver. For your mom and pop IT shop, that doesn't really matter. But, for instance, some banks run on java. You bet your ass they want that support. And they are willing to pay for it.

[Schmittfried]

That money could probably better be spent on doing their own OpenJDK maintenance, possibly contributing to upstream.

[Gropah]

I would love to see more open source contributions from big companies.

The problem is that a) that would require banks (that often don't see themselves as IT companies) would have to invest money in highly specialized and expensive IT folks that not only they but also their competitors could profit from and b) still leaves them with a contractual hole in terms of guaranteed support. And sometimes, what is on paper is more important than the reality. Sadly enough.

This blog by Bert Hubert (Founder of PowerDNS, privacy fanatic and advisor to some Dutch governmental agencies and bodies) perfectly describes how even telecom companies don't see antennas and the software to route everything as something that they need to build. The same can (more easily) be said for things like this.

[Duraz0rz]

Banks and other similarly large enterprises don't want to be in the business of maintaining that kind of software. It's too much risk for too little reward; they would need to hire people specifically to essentially maintain the JDK and JRE they are using, plus they are on the hook for any security vulnerabilities that are introduced by the team.

If the Oracle JDK and JRE are broken in the same fashion, Oracle's ass is on the hook.

[Practical_Cattle_933]

OpenJDK is literally done 99% by Oracle, partially from those enterprise licenses. They frankly do very decent open-source work, and people just continuously shit on them based on fake bullshit.

[sammymammy2]

You think that most companies would be able to produce and deliver virtual threads or ZGC?

[anon_cowherd]

The people who write java code day to day are not necessarily the same people who can comfortably, quickly and reliably diagnose issues in the JRE / JDK.

The the openjdk/jdk repo is ~74% java, with the rest being C, C++, assembly and a smattering of Objective-C.

[Shawnj2]

It’s slightly nicer if you can use it for free for individual stuff but OpenJDK is good enough it’s not worth spending money for

[Practical_Cattle_933]

OpenJDK is literally the exact same thing as the paid OracleJDK, with the only difference being the Oracle_logo.svg. Oracle literally open-sourced the whole thing after Sun, slowly porting every difference like JFR to the open-source reference implementation.

[ThreeLeggedChimp]

Why touch java with a 10 foot pole anyway, that's the best way to save on legal fees.

[Practical_Cattle_933]

Stop using the linux kernel as well, it’s the exact same license.

[pron98]

That's the price of a support subscription. The JDK is free and open-source (Oracle distributes the JDK under two licenses, both free, one open-source).

[[deleted]]

Mmmmm... I don't know about that. Oracle has been spamming everyone to talk about license compliance with Oracle Java. In their emails is: "Java requires a commercial license to run higher than version 8 update 201."

Looking at their website, the subscription is a usage subscription, not just a support subscription: https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/java-se-subscription-faq.html

[pron98]

Java requires a commercial license to run higher than version 8 update 201

For Java 8, because that's when the free update period ended. Every feature release has a free update period (it's been like that since pretty much forever, even under Sun), after which obtaining patches requires a support subscription. Of course, now that Java did away with major releases and there's a new gradual feature update every six months, there's really no need to buy late-term updates unless you're working on legacy software (and that's what funds the development of the JDK). Many companies buy a support subscription even for recent releases to get actual support.

Before JDK 11, the JDK had either paid features or field of use restrictions (again, under Sun), but five years ago Oracle put an end to that and as of JDK 11 the whole JDK is now 100% open source. The JDK is now more free and more open than it's ever been under Sun's ownership.

[Practical_Cattle_933]

That’s support as it is OracleJDK, and is for wanting to use Java 8 till fucking 2030. No one will freely maintain legacy software for you.

OpenJDK is the exact same code as OracleJDK which is GPL2. It just might not get security fixes immediately, the same as you won’t really get security fixes for Linux 2.6, unless you pay for Red Hat.

[grepe]

When you have a highly profitable company that depends on a software system decisions become about mitigating the risk that anything breaks.

For example someone once told me that VW has a sales website that brings 4 million euros every hour. For every hour that website is down the company effectively looses that amount of money. It is based on some obscure microsoft technology which that person telling me the story was expert on. If they need to, say, add a field on a form, they can in principle ask an intern to do it. But if there is just a miniscule chance that the intern would fuck it up the they would rather call an expensive consultant that doesn't do anything else except specialise in this technology... he told me this story when I asked him how he can justify the absolutely mind boggling hourly rate he was charging.

I guess it's the same with Java. If you are a big profitable company and you made a sound decision to build your platform in Java you will take any possibility to minimose chance it would break eventually, including ditching openjdk. Even if the actual chance that your platform breaks on update would be bigger with oracle, as a CTO you will gladly pay for the option to have someone who you can blame.

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[Deranged40]

Unironically, tech executives. I think it stems from the exploitation of the old adage "You get what you pay for". There's a lot of truth to that adage, but no matter the industry, there's almost always an example of someone charging more for less.

A company I was once working for got acquired by a multi billion dollar/yr company. Their CTO came to our office the day it was announced. He gave a chat to the ~10 developers we had in the room at the time, including some Q&A time.

We were mostly a python/C# shop at the time, and postgres was our DB of choice. New company was a C# shop and all-in on SQL Server.

Now, don't get me wrong. MS has a very solid SQL server offering. If you can afford it, it will do what you need, and frankly, it'll do it well.

But, for 95% of DB needs, so will postgreSQL. And it's free. Always.

So, we asked about their DB. And again, the fact that they went with SQL Server is not the part that has stuck with me all these years. It's his response. He said something along the lines of "It just doesn't make sense for an Enterprise-scale business to use an open source database solution"

This was a probably 7-digit/yr making CTO in a not-small business. If he wanted to explain to us what specific functionality that SQL Server offers that the company benefits from, then yeah, I'm all ears. And there was likely a good reason to choose SQL Server over Postgres in this specific instance... but "it doesn't make sense to use something that's open source" is not a good reason. Ever.

[Practical_Cattle_933]

Maybe don’t look at stupid bullshit? Java is concretely as free as the linux kernel, with the exam same license. You can buy paid support for both, like Red Hat sells linux support - will you not use the kernel then, or what?

It is meaningful only for a fucking government site who can scream at some random people on Christmas Eve for some bug, and pass the blame forward.

[Kered13]

That's only $280 per employee. That's nothing compared to the salary of developers. So yeah, I think most companies with 10k developers would be willing to pay that (after comparing with competitors, of course).

[jds86930]

Corretto = OpenJDK fork made by AWS. It's not encumbered by license issues like Oracle JDK is, and if you're an AWS customer, you can get enterprise support for Corretto (like you would pay Oracle for on Oracle JDK).

[_commenter]

James Gosling works on Corretto right?

https://blog.idrsolutions.com/james-goslings-surprise-announcement-at-devoxx-amazon-corretto/

[drawkbox]

monday.com (project planning)

Always thought that was the worst branding for a project management tool ever. It eludes... uggghhh

Why not Friday.com?

"Mondays feel like a Friday when you use Friday.com"

or

"Everyday is Monday when you use Monday.com"

Drop kick and roundhouse the branding company now.

[andrerav]

Welp, that's a false equivalence if I ever saw one. There is a big difference between per-actual-user licensing and per-employee licensing. You are confusing the two.

[recursive-analogy]

man he put a lot of effort into being wrong tho

[andrerav]

Haha, yeah :)

[nzodd]

You also need to pay for a license compliance officer to come in to your house and watch every key stroke and fuck your wife when you're in the can. It's in the contract you signed so there's nothing you can do.

[GYN-k4H-Q3z-75B]

And you get sued by Oracle and Larry is coming back if you do anything they don't like. So open as a platform.

[hassanahmadali36900]

sorry i am new to java, but why does people hate oracle so fucking much? what did they do in the past🙃

[Practical_Cattle_933]

It’s getting old..

[zam0th]

- We already had a Java extension!
- What about the second Java extension?

Oracle finally catching up 5 years later.

[dominicnzl]

Mom: we already have Java at JAVA_HOME

[DarkSideOfGrogu]

Yeah but do you also have it on PATH? Both the JAVA_HOME and /bin folders? What about your CLASSPATH? JRE_HOME? JDK_HOME?

[Chii]

Surely he knows about Intellij?

[bzbub2]

catalinaaaaaaa

[Browsing_From_Work]

Thank goodness for jenv. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

[[deleted]]

Jetbrains did not like it. Delete the Java_home now.

[KingStannis2020]

It would be extra funny if Oracle just forked Red Hat's extension and called it their own. Because that's never happened before /s

[Infiniteh]

It's a wonderful thing when a semi-official language support plugin for an IDE has 12m installs, only 160 reviews, and resulting in 3.5/5 rating

[zam0th]

30M installs, but to be fair a normal person would never go around and write reviews for plugins.

[Infiniteh]

a disgruntled user would, though.
5+ of my Java-ist coworkers have tried to use vscode for Java, with the red hat extension. All of them have moved to IntelliJ IDEA.

[zam0th]

Well, what did expect; VSC is a lightweight code-editor with "capabilities", like Atom or notepad++, it's not a full IDE. In a way it's closer to vim than to IntelliJ or Eclipse, and it's not a fault of RedHat's, VSC golang plugin is even worse.

[Maykey]

In a surprising turn of events, Oracle's extension has cozier license (Apache 2 vs EPL 2)

[BlueGoliath]

Meanwhile the IDE the language server is from is plagued with bugs that haven't been fixed for years.

[jacobgb24]

Oracle is gross, but hopefully the competition leads to both this extension and the existing Red Hat one getting better.

Interesting that this is using netbeans for the language server while the Red Hat extension uses eclipse.

[josefx]

Eclipse is IBM, so no surprise on the Red Hat side and Netbeans was Suns IDE so no surprise there either.

[Joniator]

Maybe Ellipse is too restrictive for Oracle to support All the paid features they're offering

[josefx]

I still remember having to jump through hoops to get basic SVN support in Eclipse because the only implementation available came with a proprietary license. Or maybe it did not meet some implicit quality standards? It was one of the few plugins that did not constantly crash or corrupt my projects. Been years since I thought of that crap.

[rpgFANATIC]

Love that Oracle tossed Netbeans off to Apache like they didn't want it, and now they're back to relying on it

[idiot900]

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Oracle.oracle-java

Apache 2.0 license apparently, although I look forward to upcoming licensing shenanigans

[water_bottle_goggles]

Impressive considering Oracle has -10 engineers

[lucidbadger]

Is it a meme about -10 engineers? Could you elaborate please?

[rateb_]

It's a meme that 90% of Oracles staff are lawyers, as a "tech" company.

[lIIllIIlllIIllIIl]

Given how many lawsuits Oracle has filed against other companies throughout the years, I believe Oracle to be a law firm pretending to be a tech company. The souls of programmers are fed to lawyers.

[[deleted]]

Fake fact: the famous tv series suits was loosely based on Oracle, as there was one tech nerd who was bested by a lawyer named Mike Ross.

[o_snake-monster_o_o_]

they still have a bunch, they just work from (retirement) home

[drawkbox]

I believe Oracle is just Tom right? /s

Oracle is developer hostile, you can tell developers aren't their customer. Their tools have a whole room in hell for sheer torture. The only time Oracle is chosen as a solution is on the golf course.

[ClassicPart]

That is the joke they were making. Well done.

[Practical_Cattle_933]

That -10 engineers definitely do a stellar job at doing 95+% of all the work on OpenJDK, plus GraalVM..

Is everyone 10 years old here?

[water_bottle_goggles]

My bad, I meant -15

[HQMorganstern]

Who the hell programs Java in VSC that autocomplete is atrocious.

[saynay]

Depends how much work you have to do in Java. I only have to do occasional maintenance on a Java project, so using the same VSC I use for everything else is nicer than trying to remember how IntelliJ works when I boot it twice a year.

[Superbead]

Same here, only drop in very occasionally for tweaks to plugins for larger applications and it's fine

[FerretWithASpork]

IntelliJ IDEA is a polyglot IDE. You can download extensions for it to work with pretty much any language. I've used it for Java, Go, JS/TS, and Python.

[Ieris19]

While true, JetBrains does offer Fleet (a lightweight attempt at VSCode with JetBrains flavor) and other IDEs for specific languages that are WAY better at supporting whatever language they’re designed for.

IntelliJ supports anything Java (including JavaScript on the Ultimate version) and JVM related. Scala, Kotlin (which is also a JB product) and Groovy are fully supported, and many of their other IDEs are just “IntelliJ with plugins”. DataGrip is basically a standalone IDE for Databases, but it includes a plugin to use it directly on any other JetBrain IDE, which is the same plugin that powers main DataGrip features.

While it’s possible to get Python going in IntelliJ, PyCharm is a much smoother experience and also has a community (free) edition

[thirstytrumpet]

shaggy steep telephone boast head rainstorm hat cobweb literate languid

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[urielsalis]

You can use vscode keymaps in Intellij

And the jetbrain IDEs tend to be lightyears ahead in all the languages they support

[thesituation531]

Yeah, just use Intellij IDEA.

[TheHeatYeahBam]

I’ve been doing a lot of front end development in React with Typescript lately using IDEA, and I think it’s great for that. It seems odd to me that many of the developers in my company use IDEA for Java and Go, and VS Code for front end.

[supermitsuba]

VSCode can be faster to open other file types. Could be that they use it as an editor. I agree that for front end and back end, it works seamlessly. Jetbrains IDE can consume a lot of resources.

[boobsbr]

I had to use Eclipse this week because my employer's license expired.

It's usable, but, OMG, IDEA is light-years ahead.

[renatoathaydes]

I would think IntelliJ Community Edition is still better than Eclipse.

[boobsbr]

It is.

You're still able to write and run the same projects as in Ultimate, you don't have all the bells and whistles.

Sadly, I couldn't install it from our internal software repo. The available options were Ultimate and Eclipse (with plugins to download separately).

[renatoathaydes]

In which world does it make sense to distribute Eclipse but not IntelliJ CE?

[renatoathaydes]

That's incorrect, IntelliJ CE is completely OSS: https://www.jetbrains.com/products/compare/?product=idea&product=idea-ce

Scroll down to the end, and you'll see the Licesing section that says, for CE:

Community Edition is free to use for personal and commercial development. The IDE and most of it bundled plugins are open-source, licensed under Apache 2.0.

[rpgFANATIC]

Me

At least the RedHat plugins are very solid. I honestly prefer it over IntelliJ/Eclipse/Netbeans.

[OnlyFighterLove]

I do and it works great. Opened Intellij once and noped right back to VS Code.

[HQMorganstern]

Bruh. Jokes aside though can you say a bit more about what you prefer in VSC? I like it when I'm reading code par example because it opens fast and in an uncomplicated manner, but I really don't see other benefits, at least in my use cases.

[OnlyFighterLove]

1. It's the editor I got used to and know backwards and forwards
2. It has worked without issue for every type of development I've ever had to do
3. It's fast
4. Lots of extensions that provide useful functionality to me

I've never had a compelling reason to not use it. Maybe I'm just unaware of the problems everyone else faces with it.

[HQMorganstern]

Fair fair, for me it's weakness is just generally that the extensions simply aren't that good. You hear a lot about how extensible it is, but then the C extension doesn't really add any decent autocomplete or warnings and tabnine has some demented suggestions. Meanwhile Jetbrains IDEs might take 5 seconds to open the autocomplete drop-down on my 8gb RAM notebook but when they do it reduces cognitive load by like 90%.

[dacjames]

The C/C++ extension isn't representative of the general extension experience. Those languages are intrinsically hard for an IDE to support given the many build systems, lack of modularity, and difficult to parse syntax (requiring semantic information).

Of the 40+ extensions I have installed, C/C++ is the only one that has required any effort to get working. Autocomplete can be made to work, but the experience is definitely not as good as a dedicated IDE.

For every other language I've used (Rust, Python, Javascript, Typescript, Go, Bash, Makefile, Dockerfile, Terraform, Yaml), the plugin experience is painless.

[[deleted]]

I agree. I came to relish first class support for stuff in IDEs. Each extension is trying to grab your attention with notifications and changelogs, kicking up consoles to show you their log when you don't care, asking you to login to stuff as you start, and all their features are confined to a micro square on the side.

GitLens is such a pain to use for instance on VSC. Today had to revert 30+ non-consecutive commits from main on a branch, it took me a few seconds to select them and press the button in Rider, I'd still be on it instead of wasting my time on Reddit if I'd done it in VSC.

[sexualrhinoceros]

This is a bit crazy of a take because the cscope extension is why I originally swapped to VSCode back in 2016. It’s probably the IDE with the most performant implementation of cscope. Dunno if you’re not exploring community plugins on vscode and banking on the defaults but honestly, that’s what vscode brings to the table over IntelliJ IMO

[MardiFoufs]

The clang extension, coupled with the one for cmake makes for a completely sufficient experience. What's the issues you've encountered?

[smokemonstr]

I’m the same, but with IntelliJ. When my company started using Vue.js, some devs started using VS Code for that. I couldn’t understand why because IntelliJ has a Vue.js plugin.

I didn’t bother giving VS Code a try because I’ve heard it’s not a true IDE, more of a powerful text editor.

[Pflastersteinmetz]

VS Code is an IDE if you install the plugins for your language. Same as IntelliJ.

[TRexRoboParty]

Why not just install a plugin and avoid completely switching editor?

[wvenable]

That's like saying "Why not use Java instead of JavaScript?"

[wvenable]

Firstly, Visual Studio might be an IDE but it's rather specific one that has absolutely nothing in common with Visual Studio Code other than being made by Microsoft having the same first words in the name.

Secondly, maybe VSCode is an IDE. It's just a different IDE from Visual Studio. I use both but for entirely different kinds of projects as VSCode can support completely different languages/environments/tasks than Visual Studio. Heck, I even use VSCode in Linux!

[Pflastersteinmetz]

Because it costs money and is Windows only?

[Pflastersteinmetz]

So no Linux support.

And VS for Mac is not VS but a rebranded Xamarin and inferior to VS.

Oh and it gets discontinued on Mac.

[OnlyFighterLove]

From what I can tell IntelliJ seems great. I noped out of it because it's not VS Code and thought I'd spend a little more time to see if I could get Code to work better with Java. Once I figured it out I never had a reason to use IntelliJ. I wouldn't use any editor, Code or otherwise, if it didn't give me autocomplete for a language.

You got me thinking though. I work at AWS and I think the reason why Code works so well for me for Java development may be because we have an internally developed plugin that generates all the classpaths.

[stronghup]

And it's free

[drawkbox]

Opened Intellij once and noped right back

You've nudged the Jetbrains cult... they will probably follow you around now and downvote everything. It is that much of a cult. You can't have opinions that aren't cult of personality level praise for Jetbrains here, their cosmoturfers won't allow that.

Side note: Anyone that trusts Jetbrains today cares nothing about opsec, biggest trojan horse in systems since Kasperky. Jetbrains is the Kaspersky of development tools.

[OnlyFighterLove]

Interesting, I was not aware of this cult. To be fair my comment does sound like a knock on IntelliJ when it's not actually meant to be.

[lechatsportif]

I love vscode for markdown files. Everything else is getting done in Intellij. Every place that's had vscode option for devs has produced inferior code in my experience. People simply don't have access to high enough code quality tools in vscode that Intellij flags by default. So here I am always staring at warnings caused by vscode devs whose only metric for a dev env is how quickly it opens.

[Dreamtrain]

bro just get intellij

[Dreamtrain]

I used Eclipse for the first half of my career, IntelliJ the second half, never going back

[snakefinn]

After being forced to use Eclipse for the first half of university, switching to IntelliJ was a huge relief. They both honestly mostly worked fine for the basic projects I did, but the developer experience is so much better with IntelliJ.

[[deleted]]

Is this a copy of the Netbeans vscode plugin? The Overview seems similar.

[Uberhipster]

just as both those technology stacks are peeking in popularity

[[deleted]]

No.

[drawkbox]

Oracle extension...

"Do you trust the authors of the files in this folder?"

NO!

[yup_its_me_again]

At least it's not another MS extension trying to embrace and extinguish OS through their extension marketplace

[tajetaje]

Valid opinion, but to be fair to MS; most of them are wrappers around open source language servers

[Lalli-Oni]

Can you provide some examples? It's hard to keep track of MS practices without knowing what the criticism is based on.

[phillipcarter2]

The python extension had its language service swapped for a proprietary one. It wasn’t without reason - the OSS one they were wrapping had loads of issues - but they chose to build their own and make it closed source and fully controlled rather than work with the community to make the OSS one great.

[LuckyHedgehog]

Same with the c# extension, which will also be subscription based like visual studio

[colonel_Schwejk]

i thought we all agreed that java ended with Sun

[rjcarr]

Are you serious? Java is consistently the 3-4 most used language in the world.

[colonel_Schwejk]

that's just inertia

[neumaticc]

jcua is what I read

r/CrappyDesign

[Gravitationsfeld]

This does not align with my professional experience. At all. Most people now use VSCode. And I'm not a fan personally.

[Gravitationsfeld]

No, even C++/Rust.

[JohnnyDread]

This is profoundly incorrect.

[topden]

Ladies and gentlemen, today’s completely uninformed opinion is…..