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Inprise/Borland Pledge Support For Mac OS X

Posted by HeUnique on from the that's-good-to-know dept.

Over at Infoworld, there is an article about Borland which announced at the Borland Developers' conference that JBuilder will be available next year for Mac OS X with support for the Apple's upcoming Aqua GUI. The article also mentions that Inprise/Borland is now commited to the developers community. Thoughts, anyone?

5 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. what's the news really. by jilles · · Score: 4

    Considering that the whole thing is 100% Java, it is more surprising that they actually have to port the thing than that they ported it. The whole aqua thing is just a free ride on Sun's announced port of jdk 1.3 to Mac OS X which will include an aqua theme for swing.

    It would be nice though if they would also consider porting delphi to Mac OS. It shouldn't be to hard considering they are already porting it to linux. With support for mac OS they would have support for all major consumer desktops.

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    Jilles
    1. Re:what's the news really. by jilles · · Score: 4

      I shouldn't be answering to this but I'm bored:
      - There's not much point in compiling java natively, at best you get a few percents additional performance but you lose dynamic binding, which is a very usefull feature worth at least a few percentage points. Check out the benchmarks and not just those provided for towerJ.
      - Java servlets are deployed on servers, those servers can be anything running a java virtual machine, for instance a mainframe from IBM or linux.
      - Last time I checked, borland did not include a static compiler. Static java compilers are very much a niche market since they do not offer the performance boost most people expect. The reason for that is that the assumption that java performs bad because it is not compiled natively is plain wrong. It's not the bytecode but the excessive use of OO and dynamic binding that makes things slow.

      So whoever moderated this guy up, please moderate it down again, it's an obvious troll or at best the response of someone who has had his head stuck in the ground for the past few years. Any of the arguments in this post have been made dozens, if not hundreds of times on this site alone.

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      Jilles
  2. Great Move for Borland by Metrol · · Score: 4

    They've pretty much lost they're foothold on Windows over the years to MS's tools. By heavily supporting Linux and Mac they're filling a great niche that's been left open for far too long.

    Another possible offshoot of this is having them seen as a great development platform to program for multiple OS's. If that becomes the case, they could make a serious run at MS's suite of tools. This is just good news all the way around. Hope Borland has the stuff to make it happen.

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    The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
  3. uphill fight... by Frymaster · · Score: 5
    "This is the first real development tool on the Mac for the last eight years,"

    What the hell? I'm stunned that Borland would make such a statement. CodeWarrior is most definitely a "real development tool"... oh, and it does java rad too (although even a small change in the RAD builder rewrites all RAD code forcing you to do some fancy copy/paste...)

    Borland may be surprised to find that the Mac community really loves their CodeWarrior, and for good reasons:
    1. When all had abandoned the mac, Metrowerks toughed it out and gave us some pretty hot stuff.
    2. When IDEs on "other platforms" were going for hundreds (sometimes hundreds and hundreds) of dollars, metrowerks offered a "discover" package that compiled C, C++, Java and Pascal for $100.
    3. Everyone knows mac programming can be a bit of a black art (just how many times do I need to call moreMasters()? three? oops... let's try four) Their response? CodeWarriorU. For free. If you're of the opinion that Dan Parks Sydow can't write (and he can't) you're grateful...
    4. If you download code for the mac it's almost always in an .mcp format. Heck, even Apple does this... not a great vote of confidence for MPW. Mind you, with java it's not such a big deal, but it's helped ingrain CW into the Mac psyche.
    5. Merchandise. Will Borland offer boxers as cool as the PowerPlant ones? Will their mascot be cooler than Arnold? Hm. Probably not.

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    2 1337 4 u!

  4. Re:But why support Apple at all? by MouseR · · Score: 4

    The phrase 'monopoly' comes to mind, here.

    Monopoly isn't a phrase. It's a word. Just like dumb.

    That was a dumb, unthought of BS comment is a phrase.

    The mere thought of someone saying Apple holds a monopoly with it's 8-9% marketshare dims my hope for global intelligence. is my answer.