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?"

Re:Irritatingness

[Monkelectric]

At one time, Borland compilers were among the best in the world. Microsoft wanted to cripple them -- so they offered *all* of their top engineers double their salary at Borland to work for Microsoft. I think something like 40 engineers defected. Borland products have *sucked* since.

I used to be a big fan of C++ Builder but it was completely unusable. In a short (few hundred line) project I ended up finding *SEVERAL* bugs in their stdio and cin/cout implementation.

Anyone want a hardly used copy of C++ Builder? :)

Incorrect News

[Anonymous Coward]

Theregister is inccorect.

Posted by Borland Developer Relation at borland.public.delphi.non-technical newsgroup
or
http://newsgroups.borland.com/cgi-bin/dnewsweb?cmd =article&group=borland.public.delphi.non-technical &item=490600&utag= [borland.com].

Taking that information and stating that "JBuilder is now open source" is extremely irresponsible, in addition to being plain wrong.

Re:What the hell is eclipse?

[pringlis]

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.

Re:Which one is better?

[gaygeek]

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.

Re:Delphi too, please

[Anonymous Coward]

Lazarus isn't ready yet for the masses, and I believe it won't be for another year or so; I regularly download and test it since two years, then I delete it because it simply still isn't there.
It looks promising but it's still buggy as hell. Last time I tried it, less than 3 months ago, it crashed X every time I opened twice in a row a configuration dialog. This made Lazarus unusable for me.

Re:Which one is better?

[varag]

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.

Re:Which one is better?

[omicronish]

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?

Re:Irritatingness

[justins]

At one time, Borland compilers were among the best in the world. Microsoft wanted to cripple them -- so they offered *all* of their top engineers double their salary at Borland to work for Microsoft. I think something like 40 engineers defected. Borland products have *sucked* since.

I know we are all supposed to hate Microsoft and believe them to be the cause of all that is wrong in the world, but Borland hosed themselves. Does the word "Inprise" mean anything to you?

Borland made some very, very bad decisions which made abandoning ship appealing to the top people. It's not as if Microsoft imposed an utterly retarded management on Borland during the mid-nineties.

Re:Delphi too, please

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't need the full Delphi. Even opening the VCL alone would give us a very well designed Object Model. Writing stubs to remap calls to xlib, glib, whatever would be a nightmare but the end result could pay. The less we are forced to use GTK, the better Linux will become.

BTW, the VCL library is the same used also on Borland's C++ Builder which is -surprise- a C++ IDE, so a Pascal compiler could be used, albeit not required.

Re:Is the future of enterprise IDE open?

[eviltypeguy]

If you don't mind using KDE stuff there's kdevelop, which is pretty nice.

If you're of the GTK persusasion, Anjuta's pretty decent too.

I must agree though, Visual Studio is the best that I've seen when it comes to editing source in an IDE still...

Re:eclipse is still the best windows cvs software

[Dan-DAFC]

Try SmartCVS [smartcvs.com], it's the best CVS client I've used by some distance.

Re:Irritatingness

[killjoe]

And yet Borland sued MS for poaching their top talent and MS settled for a a couple of hundred million.

You must admit that it's pretty damned hard to run a company when Bill Gates wants to put you out of business. It's amazing to me Bill failed with borland I guess we can thank the court system for that.

Borland has entirely lost its credibility

[hobuddy]

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.

Re:Delphi too, please

[cicho]

Install the same components, yes, but you absolutely don't need to replicate the directory structure.

Re:Hope that includes Togethersoft! (UML)

[DrEasy]

There already is a Together plug-in for Eclipse: it's called the TogetherJ Eclipse Edition. [borland.com]

Re:Delphi too, please

[NavySpy]

It is true that the you need to have all the components a person has on their machine for you to compile on yoru machine. But what development tool /doesn't/ have that requirement? Of course you need all the code the original coder has.

It is /not/ true that they need to be in the same directory structure as the original machine.

Re:Irritatingness

[benow]

The early builds were ass. They became much better over time.

Re:Borland is realizing what IBM did

[Trejkaz]

The gap isn't as narrow as you say. IDEA performs a lot better (and faster) than Eclipse.