I felt there is a confusion by members in understanding my initial mail.
I am not talking about "NetBeans IDE" the topic being discussed is "NetBeans Platform"
Please refer to the information at
http://netbeanside61.blogspot.com/2010/09/netbeans-ide-is-powered-by-netbeans.html to get more information.
I am including some portion of that article here for quick reading:
NetBeans IDE is built upon a software system called as NetBeans Platform. NetBeans Platform is used in software
development since year 2000
when it went open source. NetBeans Platform is a framework which
enables rapid desktop application development. It is an evolving
platform and can do much more than rapid application development.
When we start developing a Java application, to achieve some business
requirement; we often encounter a set of similar minimum requirements
for a software.
The requirements like:
- Software shall be modular, which will enable us to turn modules on or off.
- Software shall be extensible, which will make it easy to add more functionality and extend the existing functionality.
-
Software shall have a consistent User Interface and shall follow industry standards for graphical user interface.
- Software shall provide multithreaded approach for parallel tasks.
- Software shall contain configurable settings for many features offered in it
- Software shall have dockable windows
- Software shall be cross platform
- Software shall have cross platform deployment mechanism in such a
way that native operating system users are comfortable with it
- Software shall have a update mechanism, which will enable the user to update the modules online
- Software shall have module versioning feature which enable
developers to create modules for the software which depend on certain
version of earlier modules
NetBeans Platform provides
solutions for all the requirements mentioned above in a time tested
way. It is prudent to use such a platform to develop softwares having
more than one of the requirements listed above to save time in
architectural features which are necessary for the stability and
usability of the software.