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

Delphi too, please

[Aggrajag]

Just opensource Delphi as well. I just love Pascal as a programming language.

Re:Delphi too, please

[Anonymous Coward]

lazarus makes horribly large binaries, the simplest gui hello world is 1 meg or so

Re:Delphi too, please

[killjoe]

Delphi/Object pascal does need some updating though. They really need something to make sure an application you wrote with delphi can be easily compiled by somebody else. Maybe something like ant or a way to specify dependencies via relative paths or something.

Right now if you built a non trivial delphi app and sent me the code I would have to install every single component you used (the same versions in most cases) and place them in the exact same directory structure as you in order to compile your code.

Open? I sure hope so....

[ZephyrXero]

I think the future of all software is going to be more and more open ;) Companies are starting to learn that most components of their programs can be released in a free/open-source format (especially the file format) and then you can sell a more complex version with the real things that give your product value added on top of that.

Too earlt to tell

[jvv62]

Seems to me the article doesn't really say anything. Thus it is too early to have a decent discussion of what Borland is doing. On the other hand it is nice to see an OSS product making headway against a proprietary product. I liked JBuilder, and I think there are some features to Jbuilder that would be nice additions to Eclipse. Also the GUI seemed a little more solid in JBuilder than in Eclipse.

Is the future of enterprise IDE open?

[woah]

Not really, given that Microsoft would never do this with Visual Studio.

What it really means ...

[tomhudson]

... is that Java and/or Borland, is dying.

Seriously, Borland used to be a cool company, before they became Inprise and forgot what made them great in the first place. And java still suffers from bloat and speed issues.

Re:What it really means ...

[tomhudson]

java suffers most from it's **horrible** look and feel in graphical apps.

oh yeah. "horrible" is being too kind by half.

The speed issues are usually not a problem unless you are doing something with java that you should have used C for

In my book, that's pretty much everything. There's got to be a better way.

All or only part?

[imemyself]

What exactly is gonig to be OSS'ed? The entire thing or just bits and pieces of it?

Borland is realizing what IBM did

[thammoud]

years ago. There is no money to be made in stock IDE's. Building value added plugins for a popular IDE (Eclipse) and people might pay more money. The Java platform is in a wonderful position with all the free (and superb) IDE's available. Eclipse and Netbeans are both excellent IDE's that other platforms can only dream off.

My prediction is that IDEA's IntelliJ will also go open source. The gap between it and the above mentioned IDE's is very narrow to warrant spending the dough.

Re:Borland is realizing what IBM did

[(H)elix1]

Building value added plugins for a popular IDE (Eclipse) and people might pay more money

Isn't that the truth. IBM jumped into Eclipse with WSAD, then moved to the Eclipse 3 core with Rational Application Developer. I found myself in the unfortunate position of needing the current cut of RAD for the portal toolkit plugin for WPS 5.1 - only to find they want over 4k for the 'value add'. Lots of extras in there like the modeling tools, none of which I needed...

The EJB stuff is slowly working its way into Eclipse, which seems to me where most of these guys were trying to make their money. Even Netbeans had an 'enterprise' version for a couple grand if you wanted to do anything more than JavaBeans and JSP. It amazes me how long it took before things like My Eclipse plug-ins that give EJB tools for $30 a year - looking forward to more and more of these tools becoming commodity IDE items. Got to wonder how long IBM and others can keep charging stupid money for the plugins, however.

I think this is good news.

[ocularDeathRay]

I always liked borland's C/C++ IDE, although I never got much chance to use jbuilder. When I was going to the local community college the first time around, they gave us a choice to use either borland or MS IDEs. I always used borland... Then a couple years and a couple jobs later I was back at the same school to find that only MS IDEs were supported. By then it didn't matter cause I was using linux at home and did all my homework in vim with gcc.

Re:What do you want to open source today?

[rebug]

To most people, Windows already is free. It's a non-optional compoent of their new Dell, not an add on. Non-geeks never upgrade their OS, so Windows' cost is never an issue.

Re:What do you want to open source today?

[linguae]

There is a huge difference between free as in "comes with my Dell" and free as in speech (open source), though. The grandparent post was referring to open-source Windows, not "free" Windows.

Java

[Mark_MF-WN]

I think you see this more with some languages than others. Interpreted and VM languages, like Java, Perl, and Python, have a tendency to be extremely open. I believe this stems at least partly from the difficulty of concealing the sources of such languages -- even when compiled to a byte code of some kind, applications written in them still tend to be quite easy to disassemble. Compare that to C++, which is difficult to disassemble; it's much easier to conceal source.

As a result, languages like Perl, Python, and Java have a strong tradition of OSS licensing, and C/C++ less so.

That's just my impression of the industry though from my own interaction with the Python, C++, and Java communities; don't take this as some attempt to be the moses of language-politics. :)

Re:Irritatingness

[Textbook Error]

The software was so completely irritating and impossible to use that I decided it was more than my university career was worth and dropped out of university with nothing at the end of first year

Here's an alternative explanation. You're a bit of a dumbass, and decided to bail from a privilege that most of humanity never gets a chance to experience (higher education).

Anyone who decides to give up that opportunity because of a flaky IDE is a dipshit. Sorry to have to be the one to break it to you.

Re:Which one is better?

[FatherOfONe]

You must be a UI guy...

JBuilder is terrible because you didn't like the UI? I can understand if you didn't "like" it because of the UI, or in your case a few specific things in the UI, but to rate it as terrible is an overstatement.

Now I use JDeveloper (built off of JBuilder by Oracle) and Eclipse. I can say that JDeveloper flat out rocks. I did use Jbuilder 3.x and also found it very good.

The issue is this.
Most Java IDE's will run on multiple platforms because they are written in Java. Written in Java comes has it's pro's and cons. It will probably launch a little slower than and require more RAM, BUT.... it will easily run on multiple plaforms. The other issue with all the proprietary Java IDE's is that there is now a "good enough" open source IDE (Eclipse). It will be very very difficult for them to compete. It is my opinion that Eclipse will become the defacto IDE for Java development. Unfortunatly some very good IDEs for Java will go away (Jdeveloper, JBuilder, Visual Cafe etc)

Now as far as Microsoft goes. I personally hate the way it runs on Linux and the Macintosh. It is so buggy that the thing won't even launch :-) You would think that an IDE that cost that much money would work great. :-)

Now my opinion is this for the future.
1. Eclipse will be the IDE of choice for Java development, and as such many vendors will add features to it via the plugins. MyEclipse being the main plugin. The rate of development will be huge over the next 5 years on Eclipse.

2. Microsoft developers will use whatever Microsoft gives them. They will generally only seriously look at Microsoft solutions. At some point Microsoft will have to seriously consider giving away their visual studio product. It is my belief that they will use their "shared source" licence for it within the next 5 years.