Borland JBuilder X has been touted as Borland’s most significant release in these two years. Building on the stable foundation of the previous releases, Borland JBuilder X Enterprise Edition introduces support for newer application servers, along with enhanced performances and better overall user experience. With JBuilder X, Borland is taking application development into another level. Read on to find out more.
Review of JBuilder X Enterprise Edition
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I have been using it on a 500MHz PIII, and while it was not exactly fast it was really quite usable. I was really surprised. It also did not crash a single time in three weeks. I had a much worse experiences with earlier versions of JBuilder….
I’d like to see a review of Visual Slickedit also
Not everyone does Java..
Turbo pascal 1.0 was only 37 kb
And required 64 kb of ram.
Are we getting worse ?
Definitely a resource hog – I recommend at least 1GB of memory to run the enterprise edition effectively.
feature-wise, may be it is reasonable
JBuilder X comes with tons of ‘enterprise’ tools (which Borland got them from many acquisitions),
profiler, advance debugger, design tool, everything you can imagine about developing software.
We’ve used JBuilder for several projects in the past and have been quite pleased with it. However, last year we began moving to NetBeans due to the quite high price Borland was charging. Don’t get me wrong…1) it’s a nice product 2) I’m not implying everything needs to be free. It’s just that it seems like Borland is pricing small to medium sized shops right out of their install base.
NetBeans has been a great asset (and quite easy to port existing code to) even if it doesn’t have all the 3rd party acquisition software that JBuilder comes with.
PD
It’s got lots of nice autocorrection features (it’ll spot a mistake, and if you click on the error symbol suggest a couple of auto-fixes). It’s also got some pretty good refactoring tools, automatic getter/setter generation from member variables, customisable stored layouts and is a good bit more responsive than NetBeans.
A significant part of this responsiveness stems from the fact that it uses JINI to directly call the underlying GUI system instead of emulating it through Swing/AWT. This means it integrates nicely too, there’s no need to fiddle with Look ‘n’ Feel settings.
The downsides are that the default edition has no JSP or GUI tools built in, however it’s designed to be extendable, and there is free JSP stuff out there. Not the same for GUI though. For GUI / J2EE work you can pay for IBM’s heavily extended version, WebSphere Studio.
Anyone know any site selling the Mac Os X version of Borland Professional?
IDEa > Eclipse > JBuilder.
its been that way for ages, and so far i dont see any reason to change that opinion
Not really for ages (as Idea is few years old), but yes, once you try Idea you never look back for something better. Idea = (at least) 2x Eclipse (or JBuilder ) for few 100$.
After viewing few of the screenshots, I see JBuilder took Idea’s approach and simplified interface for a good part (at least compared to version 3, which I was using for the last time, or version 7 which my collegue is using).
Both of them (Eclipse and JBuilder) are trying to get closer with Idea (refactorings, live templates, intention hints, code inspection etc) but it seems they have long way to go.
Jbuilder is also overpriced IMHO.
“Turbo pascal 1.0 was only 37 kb
And required 64 kb of ram.”
yeah that’s relevent. And go back another couple decades to find apps that needed only 15 vacuum tubes. Or two clerks with abucuses. Or a couple of friends in the village with their shoes off so you could count a bunch of fingers and toes.
But after indulging in the sarcasm, I admit that I too find apps and OS’s getting slower and more bloated as hardware gets faster. Beos – the one counter-trend OS to this sad de-evolution – died in the corporate shark-tank.
That old Turbo Pascal you mention produced snappier apps than most apps out today. But an up-to-date Java VM on an up-to-date PC is within striking distance.
>I’d like to see a review of Visual Slickedit also
I’ll second that suggestion. I use Slickedit everyday. I couldn’t bear coding without it. It is so very, very good.
what are Borland’s plans with Kylix. I’m loking for a good and yet cheap Unix RAD. tool, and I like Kylix a lot, but am not sure whether Borland wants to continue it’s development, and whether they will make it a tad more cross-platform.
Borland has announced Kylix has been a commercial failure and will be getting no new development resources. It’s a dead end. And they don’t seem to be flexible or corporately innovative enough to open-source it.
Judging from the devastating series of layoffs Borland has hit themselves with the past few weeks, they’ll likely have to concentrate resources on their big winners – like Java, and maybe what they hope will be a big winner – DotNet.
I would rank IDE’s differently:
Oracle’s JDeveloper
JBuilder
Eclipse
Haven’t tried IDEA’s yet.
I like Jdeveloper because it’s much tighter error checking.
The parser finds 99.9% of your errors.
If you haven’t tried it you should.
Note: Price is free till you ship a commercial product,
then you have to buy a licence.
The open source development teams should be using this product.
Plus’s: Code profiling and Audit your code and Doc.
– Gui Designer
– TCP Packet Monitor
on and on and on…
Crap. I liked Kylix, but I’ll probably have to look into Kdevelop.
Hey, did they say anything about releasing Kylix as freebeerware? I can always create apps on Linux and then por the code to … screw that, some of the Kylix libraries are not portable.
But Eclipse is an awesome IDE. What I love about it is the plugin features. I do all my python, php, perl, and SQL in it (not to mention the Java).
Though, I really, really wish it had the code hiding feature of IDEa or, as it looks, the new JBuilder.
That’s why I was always hesitant to really get into the whole Delphi/Kylix cross-platform thing … I had a feeling it wasn’t going to hold up.
Wonder what kind of future Delphi has after version 8 – I’m surprised it’s lasted this long.
It’s small and sweet when using on an old machine
Borland’s prices seem really steep unless your part of their upgrade plan (which they pretty much don’t advertise at all, an no one seems to knows about it). JBuilder X (is that EX or TEN??) has a couple great new features (for me),
1. The struts designer is the best I’ve seen. AWSOME (I’m still learning how to use it).
2. The EJB designer is WAY FASTER with big projects. (150 entity beans are now managable, but they still need some kind of panning or zooming) and it supports JBoss.
3. Background building. This is really nice, my build process takes 20 minutes, being able to push it into the background means I can still work when I’m building.
4. Lots of editor improvements, bookmarking, folding, etc.
even though I really do like IDEA’s editor more (JBuilder seems to make up some ground in the last few releases), JBuilder has features that save me (cummulatively) weeks of effort (after using the EJB designer, I just can’t go back to maintaining XDoc). It does take time to learn JBuilder, if Borland were smart they’de have some kind of online video tutorials. Eclipse isn’t in the same league as JBuilder, IDEA, or slickedit.
I doubt we’ll see Kylix open sourced, Borland open sourced thier interbase database years ago and it floundered. They’ll probably just let it wither on the vine, I think if they were smart, they’de re-price it to 49.99 (same as turbo pascal) and sell the hell out of it.