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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?"
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I used JBuilder couple of years ago.. before the Eclipse's reign.... During that time... JBuilder is based on Swing... (may be they are still swing based..) as compared to Eclipse's SWT.. I feel Eclipse is better than JBuilder in this sense.. if you compare, just the IDE (not the J2EE and other wizbang stuff).
I feel they would be releasing just the base IDE for J2SE dev and they will keep J2EE pieces to their hearts.. like IBM WebSphere App Developer.
What about Lazarus?
...there is no sig...
I was unfortunate enough to subjected to Borland JBuilder whilst making the mistake of taking the Introduction to Programming module at the Computer Science department at Durham University in late 2000, and it was the worst piece of commercial software I have ever witnessed. It had a minimum recommended spec of 128MB of ram (this was nearly five years ago), or 256MB if you had it, and even then, doing simple stuff like selecting something from the menus could lock your machine up for minutes.
When I joined the course we were just using javac and a text editor of our choice, but a couple of weeks later they had to go and force us to switch to that, and to hand in our work in a JBuilder format. The slowness did make sense; apparently they had just rewritten the whole thing so that it was in Java itself, and this was 4-5 years ago, so of course it was going to be slow.
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 - which has now turned out to be one of the best career moves I've ever made. Thanks, Borland! My thoughts go out to any poor sod forced to use it.
I've used JBuilder since version 1.0 and i've recently started using Eclipse. The main difference between the two is the learning curve. It's really easy to create a web/j2ee/swing application in JBuilder, while it is a lot less easy to get going with Eclipse. Plain Eclipse is not really suited for real development: you need several other plugins (such as myeclipseide.com) for it to be useful.
The main reason for Borland to shift the focus to Eclipse is that it takes a *lot* of work to develop/maintain the basic functionality of an IDE. Look at CVS integration for example. It comes "free" with Eclipse, and is way better than what JBuilder offers. Eclipse offers a free base platform on which Borland can create & market proprietary plugins for enterprise development (this is what IBM does and what Oracle is moving to). It'll be interesting to see how commercial plugins will compete with OSS ones.
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
:)
I think you're right. But something frightens me about companies using open source as a loss leader. It makes me think they're missing the point.
But, who's to complain. If its something or nothing, I'll take something.
Easy one. I'll pick DirectX. Games easily ported through platforms... *dreams*
:).
Now, such a move would be a commercial suicide for them, as it would definitely cut the last major interest of the Windows platform as a home desktop. I won't hold my breath
This post is awesome.
Well, it would probably never happen, but I'd like to see the specifications for MS Office's file formats opened. If the file formats were open to everybody, people from various platforms and even applications can finally read and write Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Access files seamlessly. Besides, Microsoft's formats could finally be a standard.
If this ever happens, I don't think that everybody will switch from whatever MS Office version that they're using to OpenOffice or some other alternative immediately; however, MS Office would be to the Office File Formats as Adobe Acrobat is to PDF; Acrobat may be the "official" way to make PDFs and it has many nice features, but one can make tools that makes PDFs.
I'm sorry. I'm so confused right now. Jbuilder is an IDE, and Eclipse is an ide, right? Or is it a "platform SDK"? How does one release something "Onto" eclipse? Does that mean Eclipse is like sourceforge somehow? blah, why can't people be more obvious about what they're doing.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Here, take this FREE visual studio 2005 Extreme Edition with FREE donuts... write all the programs you want. You just need to pay $300 for windows 2003 to compile it.
You're closer than you think :) The Visual Studio 2005 Express edition betas (each geared toward a language such as C++, C#, VB.NET) are freely available at the moment, and final pricing has been set to $50 for each express edition, which is virtually free compared to the prices of past editions of VS.
Of course you can always go completely free (in terms of IDE price) with SharpDevelop or notepad, but VS is quite nice, especially at that price.
Now try to compary Java with C++. I mean REALLY C++. All of it. Now that is a big language even without STL.
Java GUI's can be slow. Swing in particular takes a lot of flak and I've seen some nasty personal (and public) attacks on Swing core people. The truth of the matter is that it all depends on how you program stuff. JBuilder's gui is build on swing and the last time I checked it was rather snappy.
Anyway the fun stuff is on the server-side, there Java has really found a home. There is also a lot of development happening in that area and the best of it open-source. Don't burry Java yet.
TCAP-Abort
Look at CVS integration for example. It comes "free" with Eclipse, and is way better than what JBuilder offers.
i've personally tried a round of window cvs software include WinCvs and TurtoiseCVS and I've gotta say both were incomparable to Eclipse. I don't know why there hasn't been a easier CVS software, or maybe it's because I'm not looking hard enough. That said, even if I'm building software on Visual Studio or another IDE, I would still use Eclipse to refresh the directory and synchronize with the repository.
If anyone knows of any better free CVS software out there, I'm all ears!
HD Trailers
You make in interesting comment about IBM using Eclipse. But they recently pulled out of Eclipse.org and decided to take development of their WebSphere Application Developer back in-house. Why would they do except for two possible reasons: (1) the Eclipse core is difficult to build on, or (2) they don't agree with the politics involved in developing the Eclipse core.
If the reason is (1), they wouldn't be using it as the base for their own product, WSAD, would they? So that leaves reason (2). Are the politics surrounding changes to Eclipse such that IBM feels they can't control the process enough? Do they want to control it?
What other reasons can you think of for IBM to pull out of Eclipse?
Togethersoft was (and still is) an amazing tool for roud-trip UML modelling in Java - you update the model, the code updates. You update the code, and the model updates. Never out of synch, and a pleasure to use. JBuilder soaked up TogetherSoft, and if it makes it into Eclipse, that would really fill the gap of good UML support in Eclipse.
CVS integration ... is way better than what JBuilder offers
I guess I should pick up a copy of JBuilder, just to see how horrible its CVS compponent is, if it's worse than Eclipse. I've been working a school project for about 2 months, using Eclipse and CVS on a team with four other people. Of the few things i like about Eclipse, CVS is not one of them. Compared to other tools, including Emacs, Netbeans, Tkcvs, and *gasp* the cvs command line program, Eclipse is by far the least efficient for simple version control tasks (The rest of the UI is equally confusing. The GTK+ interface is noticeably faster than netbeans's swing UI, but it usually takes me twice as long to find a command).
To check in a file, I have to pop up the package explorer, find the file, right-click, select Team->Commit... as opposed to Emacs (C-c v v) or netbeans (VC submenu on the editor tab or VC toolbar)
CVS updates require way too many mouse clicks. It always asks me if I want to update from a different tag (this is rarel, if ever, done; the update command should just update the current tag without an intermediate dialog). I find the seven keystrokes required to run "cvs up" in a terminal much faster. Once the update command finishes, the output is simply discarded, making it harder to see what files were patched, modified, conflict, etc. Occasionally it will say that a resource is out of sync, and command me to perform a refresh. God knows why it can't refresh automatically, or why the refresh is even necessary in the first place.
The one good thing i've noticed about Eclipse is the "Share project" command, which simplifies the import/checkout sequence. And two more complaints: it doesn't supprot local CVS repositories (I hav to do loopback ssh) or other version control system (RCS, subversion, etc.)
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
Borland had announced that it was expecting sales of JBuilder to drop. They dropped more than expected. Even so, they announced a profit:
Borland Posts Profit Despite Warning
They've been saying that for twenty years actually, and it is still far from being true.
This is where most software publishers are now getting it wrong. The manuals add value. Lots of value. I bought a copy of dBASE from Borland way back when just for the user manuals, even though I had Clipper (and their great user manuals).
So Borland eventually got to sell me an upgrade to dBASE5 as well, along with another set of manuals, even though I never used the software itself.
Ditto for Turbo C. Useful manuals. So I bought BC3.1. Another good set of books.
Same story for Turbo Pascal 7.
And the original Delphi.
Just a quick check in my home library - there's over 14 feet of shelf space devoted to computer programming. Most of the recent books, unfortunately, are not from the software manufacturers, but from 3rd parties (O'Reilly mostly).
uh huh...and the $50 express editions are extremely limited ( about a 1/3 of the wizards of the next higher up edition ). The professional edition isn't that much better. Sure, more wizards, more tools, but when you get into the Enterprise Architect arena...oh yeah...open up that wallet baby...that's it..wider.....no..wider still....nope....just...one..more...0 to before the decimal.
Do a search for the pricing of Visual Studio Team System....EVERYBODY...EVERYONE....even MVP's who've been on the take for years, are complaining. They're trying to do to their tools business what they did to their office business. That's why you'll still see folks using Visual Studio 6 and VS.NET 2003 for years to come. Prices just aren't commensurate with what you get anymore. period.
The core IDE platform is something that is ludicrous to reinvent. Expending the effort to re-invent the editor, compiler, preferences, and so on, won't bring a good financial return.
Eclipse and NetBeans provide the functionality already, so the commercial IDE developer can focus their efforts on plugins that make the IDE a more productive environment. They not only get the benefit of not having to develop the core technology. They also get the benefit of integrating with other tools developed on the same platform.
The companies developing the IDE's win because they have less lines of code to write. The developers win because they can pick an IDE and then integrate with other plugins.
Nah. Just right-click in the text editor view and select Team -> Commit from the context menu.
(This is Eclipse 3.1M6; I don't remember how long this feature has existed. Same disclaimer goes for the items below.)
And have you looked at the Team Synchronizing perspective? In this perspective you get a project-level diff between the working version and the repository; it will show outgoing and incoming modifications as well as conflicts, and it's a wonderful way to commit or update. It also supports commit sets, which let you set up the changeset without accessing the server, and then, when you're done, commit it as a whole.
Team -> Update will never ask for a tag; it defaults to the branch you're working on.
The CVS console shows this information, and the output is almost identical to that of the official CVS client. Window -> Show View -> Console, then make sure it's showing the CVS console by selecting this from the dropdown inside the view (as there are other types of consoles).
While Eclipse only has CVS integration out of the box, there are third-party plugins providing support for Subversion, Perforce, ClearCase, an experimental system called Stellation, and others.
As for RCS, keep in mind that Eclipse has a powerful, and very useful, local history function that transparently maintains older versions of your source files. You can define the maximum age of this history. No commit messages or tagging, however.
Not that Linus would ever agree but they have a pretty good collection of SCM tools including integrating high level requirements, detailed requirements bug tracking and SCM, UML modeling... essentially a rational light that is more flexible.
Making that whole system available would be a really big gift to open source and education. They could do it with something like the old QT license free for non profit and non commercial... They would get a huge following for their toolset overnight.
What makes JBuilder so terrible is its non-native GUI. The thing just looks bad with its GUI that's almost Win32, but not quite. Ctrl+Tab doesn't switch between code panes as you would expect in any Windows app; instead it uselessly switches between panes such as Project and Structure.
This is Windows recommended UI behavior for MDI apps. Read the interface standard.
But by far the absolute worse was its ignorance of Windows' ClearType setting for font smoothing.
That's funny: it works here.
Lots of people switch their editor fonts; many people use the font FixedSys, because it has good pixel choices. The reason it has good pixel choices is that it's a bitmap font, and is therefore unhintable in cleartype. This is the basis of most people thinking mIRC has broken cleartype support, too: it ships with FixedSys as the default window font.
Do note that there is no API call in any version of Windows from Win16 on which would not be hinted by ClearType; if Borland broke ClearType, then they remade every single bit of font drawing code from the ground up. The chances they did that are miniscule. Perhaps you just need to spend more time looking for the problem, before announcing to SlashDot how broken something is?
There are other GUI differences but I'm a horribly nit-picky person when it comes to UI
And, unfortunately, your nits picked are in contrast with the Win32 interface standard, as your demands for an MDI app to follow SDI behavior above show.
You need to learn that there's a difference between being a stickler for detail and whining that things don't work the way that you expect for them to. One is born of familiarity with existing standards; the other is clueless self-aggrandizing pablum. It's not Borland's fault that you don't know more than the very basics of Win32 UI behaviors; every single one of their pane and task switching hotkeys, including f10 and f11, are standards that have been with us longer than a default Windows TCP/IP stack. Hell, Win/QVT supported these. Maybe you should watch that movie that comes with a fresh XP install.
But it's not bad if you get used to it, so it's probably just that I'm unfamiliar with Eclipse.
Or Win32 UI standards. Or JBuilder. You actually suggest that Eclipse is more configurable than JBuilder. Have you even looked?
StoneCypher is Full of BS