Borland Releases JBuilder to Eclipse

ricochet81 writes "The Register is reporting that Borland has released the base version of JBuilder as open source on Eclipse! Is this just the next company to use open source as part of a marketing tool, akin to Sun, IBM and Oracle's opensource IDE push? Is the future of enterprise IDE open?"

Comments

Re:Irritatingness

[Monkelectric]

At one time, Borland compilers were among the best in the world. Microsoft wanted to cripple them -- so they offered *all* of their top engineers double their salary at Borland to work for Microsoft. I think something like 40 engineers defected. Borland products have *sucked* since.

I used to be a big fan of C++ Builder but it was completely unusable. In a short (few hundred line) project I ended up finding *SEVERAL* bugs in their stdio and cin/cout implementation.

Anyone want a hardly used copy of C++ Builder? :)

Incorrect News

[Anonymous Coward]

Theregister is inccorect.

Posted by Borland Developer Relation at borland.public.delphi.non-technical newsgroup
or
http://newsgroups.borland.com/cgi-bin/dnewsweb?cmd =article&group=borland.public.delphi.non-technical &item=490600&utag=.

Taking that information and stating that "JBuilder is now open source" is extremely irresponsible, in addition to being plain wrong.

Re:What the hell is eclipse?

[pringlis]

Eclipse is, at the very base, a platform. All but the most basic functionality (including the Java Development Environment which most people associate with Eclipse) is supplied by plug-ins. Users can create plug-ins to associate with the Eclipse work bench or any other Eclipse plug-in.

Basically to realease something "onto" Eclipse means that it is released as a plug-in for Eclipse. JBuilder provides functionality into the Eclipse platform which users can utilise.

Re:Which one is better?

[varag]

In my job, we used JBuilder up to (and including) JBuilder X. However, the enterprise version of JBuilder is prohibitively expensive. We evaluated Eclipse and found that adding the plugins for JBOSS IDE and XDoclet gave us enough functionality to enable us to switch for the majority of our development work. However, we still keep a copy of JBuilder X for Swing development, which (obviously) is not very good in Eclipse.

One of the intriguing aspects of Eclipse is the rich client platform, which has the potential of becoming a cornerstone of client development for enterprise systems.

Borland has entirely lost its credibility

[hobuddy]

Borland has a history of contradictory and self-defeating behavior in many areas, but especially with regard to open source, and even in closed source support for the Linux platform.

First of all, renaming a large, long-established company (to Inprise), then reverting to Borland screams "our once-famous brand has become irrelevant, so we're launching ham-handed, ill-considered reinvention attempts".

In 2000, with about nine months of preparatory fanfare, they released the source to their database engine, Interbase, under a Mozilla-style license. Soon thereafter, they abandoned open source Interbase and closed the product again.

An independent open source offshoot from the Interbase source code (Firebird) is doing fairly well, but in the course of that whole debacle, Borland managed to look both mean-spirited and incompetent.

Then they released Kylix (essentially a Linux port of Delphi) after months of hype, subsequently decided that desktop Linux was irrelevant, and cast it adrift.

In the early days of the .NET platform, Borland even released a version of Delphi that lacked the ability to compile to native code, which they subsequently decided to restore.

Those of us who've been observing Borland throughout all this expect them to maintain about as steady a course as a carload of squabbling thirteen-year-olds who just stole a car and a case of beer. The opening of JBuilder will be no different.