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Borland to build JBuilder 3 for Linux
NavySpy writes "Borland (you know, the guys that changed their name to Inprise and now have changed it back) have recently released JBuilder 3. They are releasing the Windows version first, and then are going to do an all-Java version for Solaris, with a follow on version early next year for Linux. You can read more here on borland.com. They also have a free version of Interbase for Linux, so you can put up a full featured DBMS for free. Nice to see a tools developer targeting Linux. "
If you read the Delphi newsgroups (delphi.non-technical), you will see that a call for Delphi for Linux is The Thread That Would Not Die.
Also, one of the Linux sites has had an ongoing survey as to what software people would like to see ported to Linux, and Delphi is way above whatever is in second.
Having worked, like many of you, in multiple languages, I think that Object Pascal represents a great middle ground between the awkwardness of C and the kludginess of Visual Basic. Hopefully, we will see Delphi for Linux and Solaris in the future.
Many people don't realize that the component model for Delphi, the VCL, is what inspired Java Beans and that Borland had a big part in the design of the JB architecture. Linux seems to be lacking such a unified component standard.
Mike
Founder, The Delphi Advocacy Group (www.tdag.org)
http://BestAuctionBuys.com
Glade pops up. It looks like Visual Basic or Visual C++'s form designer, but behaves quite differently (if you know how GTK packing and layout works, you'll understand these differences). You create a window, fill it with containers (horizontal boxes, vertical boxes, tables, fixed position regions, etc.), then fill those containers with widgets (buttons, combo boxes, labels, pictures, etc.). You can make your window a resizable top-level, a fixed size dialog, whatever--when you're done with all your dialogs, save your project, then hit "Write Source Code" and pick a directory. It builds a project base full of GNU autoconf scripts to generate Makefiles for the code it wrote.
If you run "configure", and run "make", you get a program. Run it and windows appear, they don't do anything. You get to edit the code it wrote (or transplant the window construction into another project) and add events, data, etc. It's a very, very handy tool (I use it to lay out AbiWord's dialogs) and I'd love to send a case of beer to the guy who wrote it.
Glade does more than just lay out widgets. It allows the user to set properties of these widgets through its properties panel window, set and edit named GTK widget styles, and more. Because GTK is pretty darn nifty, Glade is actually constructing widgets on the fly when you add them to your window area. These widgets act like they will in your program, respond to events like they will in your program, and can even take a bit of data right there for a test drive (for example, you can supply example entries for a drop-down list box and see how the pop-down window sizes up). What you see is what you get.
Glade is not a complete development environment, and I'm glad it doesn't try to be. I have XEmacs to do my editing work, and I really don't need another editor I won't use laying around.
In my windows days, I loved a program called C++ builder. It is basically a rather neat fusion of delphi/visual basic and a REAL language :).
:)
This is the one app I miss in the linux world. I even started writing a version of it myself, but unfortunantly time is not a thing i have a lot of these days (I think that's why I liked it in the first place
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
It's not like it's been available for almost a *year* or so (several months before all the other commercial-RDBMS vendors even began to come on board), or as if I ever *said*, right here on
Oh, wait -- it IS exactly like that!
(See "my" URL above? Yeah, I changed it a few months back -- to keep it current when InterBase re-arranged their site; before that, it pointed to where IB4/Linux was available for download *then*!)
Sheesh, folks, don't you even read your *own* damn site?!?
Christian R. Conrad
Christian R. Conrad
MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.
Christian R. Conrad
mail me at iki.fi ; same user ID as here
It should be good and obselete by the time they release for Linux.
The search effects the results.
I used JBuilder 2 for about six months, up until the end of last year. It was, in the end, one of the reasons I switched to Linux. JBuilder 2 crashes, it doesn't refresh the display properly, it uses funky, non-standard Java classes like "GridBagConstraints2", and it's got a lousy deployment wizard.
Even so, it's probably the best commercial Java IDE available for Win 9x/NT. And, hey, it's no worse than any of the other commercial, shrink-wrapped programs I've used on the Windows paltform. But, then, that's why I'm using Linux now.
If folks really want a Java IDE for Linux, I recommend going with one of the pure Java solutions such as NetBeans or Simplicity. There are plenty of them out there. Yup, they all have problems. NetBeans frequently crashes when you load the help facility, for example. But, hey, that's just as good as the JBuilder program has ever been, and NetBeans is free for non-commercial use. At least you're not paying for the privilege of being crapped upon.
Okay, okay, JBuilder for Linux is good because the PHB's think commercial, shrinkwrapped software is all that matters. And, unfortunately, we live in a world where the opinions of morons are increasingly the only opinions that matter. But I think the rest of us are better off using the Development Tool of the New Millennium(DTNM):
DTNM Features:
- Cross-Platform
- Works with C, C++, Java, Lisp, Perl, BASIC, Pascal, Ada, and just about any other language you care to name!
- Quick to load; memory-efficient
- Available in more styles than you can count
- Available for *NO COST* on every platform; sometimes it's even *free*!
That's right: DTNM is none other than the good ol' text editor. The tried and true solution used by professionals for decades. Although some of us were temporarily led astray by flashy GUI RAD tools, most of us very quickly realized that the cost of those tools is greater than their benefit.
You not only have to buy and learn them, you have to learn to work around them, learn to get past their quirks, learn to undo the things they do automatically which you don't want them to . . . Eventually, you realize that you're saving maybe 15 minutes of work by using them, then spending the rest of your coding time fighting against 'em.
They can have their JBuilders and their other visually oriented, rapid-application-prototyping, integrated development platforming, developer-stupifying, coder-hobbling, hacker-hating tools. I'll stick with my trusty text editor, thanks.
And guess what? Text editor users will code circles around those "RAD" dudes and dudettes every day of the week.
So thanks, Inprise/Borland, but no thanks. This is one coder who, regardless of the flashy coding tools paraded in front of him, is going to stick with the tool that works.
-Joe
I read through the article and tried to get this information ("all-java version" in the posting) out of it but I could not. Is this comment trying to say that JBuilder will be written in Java? If so then it should be cross platform and available to run on any platform, no?
If someone could help clear this up for me I would appricate it because I've been working in Java for almost 3 years now and I am still using NEdit & make because nothing out there is worth the effort (and/or available in Linux). Any comments on JBuilders of the past would also be helpful.