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Is the Android IDE based on NetBeans?

Eclipse Netbeans Osgi 2007

With the recent announcement of Android (now redirecting to the open handset alliance) and Google's involvement in a software stack, a few people are suggesting development of the stack to be based on Eclipse. However, I think the developer environment (due to be announced on November 12th) is more likely to be based on NetBeans. It's just a hunch, but we'll see what happens next week.

Either way around, whichever tool is used for the default IDE, NetBeans, IntelliJ and Eclipse are unlikely to be out of the running. What I think Android is going to evolve into is a new stack of Java on mobile phones — none of that J2ME stuff you were forced to painfully write as a kid, but real, full-on Java (or J2SE or JSE or whatever this release's naming convention is). Mobile phones have enough processing power and memory to be able to handle a full JVM; and (licensing issues aside) doesn't really matter what type of stack is used.

I'm pretty sure that it's not going to use OSGi at all. Which is a shame, because that's the sort of thing that OSGi is good at. (For a really cool example of OSGi, have a look at BugLabs products; a mini hardware device that uses hot-swap interfaces to plug hardware and configure services on the fly via OSGi.)

Oh well, time will tell. I'm either going to be 100% wrong or 100% right next week :-)