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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?"
Just opensource Delphi as well. I just love Pascal as a programming language.
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.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
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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.
-John Van Voorhis
Not really, given that Microsoft would never do this with Visual Studio.
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.
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.
What exactly is gonig to be OSS'ed? The entire thing or just bits and pieces of it?
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
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.
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.
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
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.
there's more than one way to do me.
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.
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.
"Anything from MS people would like to see open sourced?"
Clippy!
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.
Theregister is inccorect.
d =article&group=borland.public.delphi.non-technical &item=490600&utag=.
Posted by Borland Developer Relation at borland.public.delphi.non-technical newsgroup
or
http://newsgroups.borland.com/cgi-bin/dnewsweb?cm
Taking that information and stating that "JBuilder is now open source" is extremely irresponsible, in addition to being plain wrong.
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.
IntelliJ IDEA is better than either. I have used JBuilder extensively at work and although Borland tries to add features that other IDEs have (refactoring tools, web module, code folding), they just don't get it right. For example, there is no way to fold all methods in class with a keystroke, or to specify rule for what should be folded by default. The refactoring tools don't work in JBuilder unless the classes compile--no such annoying restrictions exist in IntelliJ. Web module support in JBuilder is awkward and cannot be used easily with a tool they don't specifically support like JRun, where IntelliJ has generic server support. I haven't used Eclipse enough to compare.
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.Can anyone provide a good explaination as to which they prefere, Eclipse or Borland? Are they more or less clones of one another, or do real differences exist?
I've used both for a research project. Bottom-line: JBuilder is absolutely terrible, Eclipse is great. I'm actually a C#/Visual Studio guy, so I can make comparisons with that as well :)
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. If you Alt+Tab back into the app, it goes into menu mode so as soon as you start typing it executes menu commands. But by far the absolute worse was its ignorance of Windows' ClearType setting for font smoothing. I have a laptop running at high resolution, and code in JBuilder looked absolutely harsh to my eyes. It was bad enough that I started typing Java code in J# for a while just to get ClearType. There are other GUI differences but I'm a horribly nit-picky person when it comes to UI, so they probably won't bother normal people (menus are too wide, menu selections are rendered in an odd manner, etc.)
Eclipse, in comparison, doesn't have these problems. The UI works fine, none of the weirdass UI quirks of JBuilder, and it even respects my font smoothing settings. It also looks very nice, and there are a ton of configuration options. In fact, there are a bit too many, or they're organized in a slightly messy fashion (I recall seeing font color configuration in 3 different places). But it's not bad if you get used to it, so it's probably just that I'm unfamiliar with Eclipse. One thing I really like is its Software Update option. Turns out Eclipse doesn't come with a visual designer for Java, but you can install one pretty easily from inside Eclipse. Eclipse also has refactoring capabilities.
Both JBuilder and Eclipse feel slightly sluggish and can take quite a while to start in comparison to Visual Studio. (I know someone's going to say Eclipse is fast for them. I don't care what you say; it feels slower than VS to me). VS 2002/2003 lack refactoring capabilities for any of the languages it supports, but 2005 will have refactoring for the .NET ones. I think Eclipse might be more configurable than VS in terms of code formatting, but I'm not entirely sure. The rest of the differences that matter to me deal with the languages (Java/C#), which shows how nice both GUI's are: for the most part they don't get in my way, which lets me concentrate on coding.
To summarize, go with Eclipse if you're doing Java development. Avoid JBuilder at all costs, although I'm curious if anyone else has had the same experiences as me?
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!
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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. :)
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.
Erlang.org: wow
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.
You must be a UI guy...
:-) You would think that an IDE that cost that much money would work great. :-)
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
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.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
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
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