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Java Programming

Borland Releases JBuilder to Eclipse 243

Posted by Zonk from the now-available-for-poking dept.
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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Borland Releases JBuilder to Eclipse More

Borland Releases JBuilder to Eclipse

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  • Delphi too, please (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Aggrajag ( 716041 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @03:46PM (#12324650)
    Just opensource Delphi as well. I just love Pascal as a programming language.

    • Re:Delphi too, please (Score:3, Interesting)

      by F1re ( 249002 )
      What about Lazarus [freepascal.org]?

      • Lazarus is just an OS alternative to the Delphi libraries. If you add Open Pascal, you do have an alternative for hacking out Delphi code. But without an OS equivalent of the Delphi IDE [about.com], your missing the one component everybody buys Delphi to use.

        I can't see the usual set of motley OS volunteers creating and maintaining an alternative to Delphi. I used to help write the Delphi API documentation, and I can't begin the convey what a massive effort it is just to maintain that product. Not something you can

        • LCL is the alternative to the Delphi VCL libaries. Lazarus IS the alternative IDE to the delphi IDE. Free Pascal is the compiler.


          It's coming along nicely. You should grab a nightly build and have a look.


          Documentation is a big problem though, as with most os projects.

          • My mistake. I read the first sentence on the "about Lazurus" page, which says, "Lazarus is the class libraries for Free Pascal that emulate Delphi," and stoped there.
        • I used to help write the Delphi API documentation,
          2 thick volumes, just for the class libraries. Nice stuff. Fairly complete, too. I always liked (old) Borlands' documentation. The "documentation-only-on-a-cd" trend devalues a product.
          • Actually, they stopped publishing the hard copy long before I was hired. The current version of the API reference would be something like 10 or 12 volumes, would cost hundreds per hard-copy set -- and would be obsolete within a couple of years. And it'd be a pain to use. With a help engine, you can select an keyword in the IDE, press F1, and go immediately to the correct topic.

            In theory anyway. When I joined, they still used the obsolete RTF-based help engine, fed by huge Word files that were a pure night

            • Re:Delphi too, please (Score:3, Interesting)

              by tomhudson ( 43916 )
              Decent printed manuals are a good anti-piracy technique. Also, they're an incentive for people who have pirated the software to go out and muy a legit copy, rather than spend money on books from 3rd parties.

              The current version of the API reference would be something like 10 or 12 volumes, would cost hundreds per hard-copy set

              People would gladly PAY hundreds per hard-copy set. Even when a free online copy is available. I bought the Gnu MAKE manual (O'Reilly) two weeks ago, even though the text is covered b


              • I bought Borland's first Turbo Pascal - for the IBM PC - a long time ago, and I remember being very impressed by the manual (not to mention the program!:) I showed it to a Vax sysadmin I knew, and he fell in love.

                I wish a lot more companies would do what they do (did?)...

                SB
                • A lot of companies see documentation as an expense, not an asset or a revenue-generator. "We're in the software publishing business, not the book publishing business" and all that ...

                  I paid $500 for the original Delphi 1 when it came out, and it included a nice set of manuals. A year or so later, a friend bought a copy for a lot less, and, instead of the user manuals, he got a crappy Sam's book or something - you know, one of those "How to use Delphi for Dummies in 24 Hours Special Edition" type books.

                  If

        • Re:Delphi too, please (Score:2, Insightful)

          by killjoe ( 766577 )
          Delphi/Object pascal does need some updating though. They really need something to make sure an application you wrote with delphi can be easily compiled by somebody else. Maybe something like ant or a way to specify dependencies via relative paths or something.

          Right now if you built a non trivial delphi app and sent me the code I would have to install every single component you used (the same versions in most cases) and place them in the exact same directory structure as you in order to compile your code.
          • Delphi is a powerful tool for the brilliant lone programmer, but its support for collaboration is half-hearted, at best. Which pretty much mirrors the attitudes of the people who work on the product.

          • Re:Delphi too, please (Score:3, Informative)

            by cicho ( 45472 )
            Install the same components, yes, but you absolutely don't need to replicate the directory structure.

          • Re:Delphi too, please (Score:2, Informative)

            by NavySpy ( 39494 )
            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.

  • Open? I sure hope so.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ZephyrXero ( 750822 ) <zephyrxero@yahoo . c om> on Saturday April 23, 2005 @03:47PM (#12324652) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re:Open? I sure hope so.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by nametaken ( 610866 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @04:09PM (#12324789)
      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. :)
      • Agreed. A good example of what I'm getting at is video games. For years companies have made a big deal about who has the best graphics and what engine they use, but these days they're all heading towards the same major plateau. It would make more sense for everyone to work together one the graphics engines and everything and just focus on what really makes your game "your game". The levels, the characters, the art, the gameplay, the story, the music...that's what makes your game worth anything. It's a perfe
        • Game Engines in the same way as e.g. Movie Players or Ebook Readers would be a good thing. The Companies would create the content but not the engine and sell that. I imagine we would see more and better (read: more depth) games that way.

    • Java (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Mark_MF-WN ( 678030 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @05:14PM (#12325103)
      I think you see this more with some languages than others. Interpreted and VM languages, like Java, Perl, and Python, have a tendency to be extremely open. I believe this stems at least partly from the difficulty of concealing the sources of such languages -- even when compiled to a byte code of some kind, applications written in them still tend to be quite easy to disassemble. Compare that to C++, which is difficult to disassemble; it's much easier to conceal source.

      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. :)

      • applications written in [Java] still tend to be quite easy to disassemble. Compare that to C++, which is difficult to disassemble; it's much easier to conceal source.

        I don't think concealing the source is the most important point in the propietary model. The question is whether people are allowed to disassemble the object code, and whether they may do anything with the results, legally.

        For example, Sun had no problem putting its SDK code in public display (a zip file included in every SDK), yet provi

      • I agree with your point, but I also feel there is a strong demographic attraction to the languages you mentioned for the more "free spirited" programmers who branch off from industry standards and try out new, interesting things.

        Perhaps the respective language's own unique personality causes its community to grow with and gain open source programmers and evangelists...

        Just a thought... :)
      • Or stated another way: code which is easy to create has a low cost of "opening". If you spent a lot of effort writing and debugging the code, you may be less inclined to "give away" all that effort.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @03:48PM (#12324662)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Which one is better? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23, 2005 @04:08PM (#12324785)
      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.

      • eclipse is still the best windows cvs software (Score:4, Interesting)

        by krunk4ever ( 856261 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @05:04PM (#12325067) Homepage
        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 [wincvs.org] and TurtoiseCVS [tortoisecvs.org] 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!

      • Re:Which one is better? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by stuuf ( 587464 )

        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 vers

          • To check in a file, I have to pop up the package explorer, find the file, right-click, select Team->Commit...

          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

    • 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 awkw
      • a mac user perhaps?

        intellij may have a nice IDE (i've honestly never tried it due to having to register just to try it out), but when there's free/open alternatives, guess which one the developer will choose to learn. intellij offers no transferable skills in the marketplace. if someone knows how to use eclipse/netbeans to build software applications, they're able to easily fit into nearly any development team.

        jbuilder was the defacto standard up to about jbuilder 6. after that sun/ibm have released som

    • Re:Which one is better? (Score:4, Informative)

      by varag ( 714360 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @04:41PM (#12324962) Homepage

      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 co

      • What's interesting is that Eclipse refactoring, debugging etc are language independent. There are plug ins for ruby, php, python etc that are all pretty nice.

        It's a nice platform that you can use to code virtually any language.

      • Re:Which one is better? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by FatherOfONe ( 515801 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @06:25PM (#12325518)
        You must be a UI guy...

        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 :-) You would think that an IDE that cost that much money would work great. :-)

        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.
      • 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 peo

  • Too earlt to tell (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jvv62 ( 236967 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @03:49PM (#12324671) Homepage
    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.

  • Is the future of enterprise IDE open? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by woah ( 781250 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @03:51PM (#12324681)
    Not really, given that Microsoft would never do this with Visual Studio.

    • Re:Is the future of enterprise IDE open? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Thank god. Can you imagine a world with even more VS programmers? *shudder*
    • 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.

      • Re:Is the future of enterprise IDE open? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by omicronish ( 750174 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @04:22PM (#12324856)

        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 [microsoft.com] at the moment, and final pricing has been set to $50 for each express edition [microsoft.com], 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.

        • 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 ye
  • ... is that Java and/or Borland, is dying.

    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.

    • What bloat really means is a gigantic lib of great parts so you don't have to code everything from scratch. The core language is still fairly compact. Of course not as compact as C but nothing else is that small. It's the swiss army knife of programming languages.

      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 peopl

      • I think the big problem was two-fold (and I just KNOW that people are going to go nuts over this, but I'll say it anyway):
        1. Requiring everything to be an object was a VERY dumb idea.
        2. Requiring garbage collection, as opposed to making it a programmer-selected or user-selected toggle, was a mistake

        A bit of personal history that maybe others can relate to ... when I first made the switch from c to c++, I went through the same "let's make everything a reusable object" phase. And, like everyone else, I discove

      • The real problem with Java is that they tried to make to many compromises and failed miserably. Why bother making it look like C when they could have designed a modern language (meaning: no semicolons e.g.) and why creating an object for everything (especially: why for the main-program?) and if everything is an object, why can't the primitive types be used like objects? Why is there no standard way to install different versions in parallel or for Bytecode to tell the user the required version of Java? Why c

        • when they could have designed a modern language (meaning: no semicolons e.g.)

          I like semicolons, you miserable clod!

          Seriously, semicolons let you pack more than one statement on a line unambiguiously.

          do_something(a,b); do_something_else(c); all_done(x); // process the stuff

          rather than

          // process the stuff
          do_something(a,b);
          do_something_else(c);
          all_done(x);
          // done processing

          The one_function_per_line is a holdover from the old days of 80x24 or 80x25 displays. The usual workaround was to do this:

          #defin

      • The core language is still fairly compact.

        It was fairly compact until 1.4.x.
        The new Java 2 version 5 version 1.5 language is not compact. It's a complete, badly designed, mess. That's the problem of putting a lot of ignorant people (JCP) to take decisions that should be made by a small group of knowledgable people.
  • Borland finally figures it out, and realizes that old saying "if you cannot beat them, join them". I wonder where we'll be on the software front 10 years down the raod, and hope it's not too late for them. One thing is for sure: The software front will be very interesting. Now, let them release Delphi and Kylix.

  • Irritatingness (Score:2, Interesting)

    by aking137 ( 266199 )
    I was unfortunate enough to subjected to Borland JBuilder whilst making the mistake of taking the Introduction to Programming [dur.ac.uk] module at the Computer Science department at Durham University [dur.ac.uk] 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

    • Re:Irritatingness (Score:5, Informative)

      by Monkelectric ( 546685 ) <slashdot@monkelectric . c om> on Saturday April 23, 2005 @04:11PM (#12324800)
      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? :)

      • Re:Irritatingness (Score:3, Informative)

        by justins ( 80659 )

        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 decisi

        • Re:Irritatingness (Score:3, Informative)

          by killjoe ( 766577 )
          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.
      • I used to be a big fan of C++ Builder but it was completely unusable.

        Care to have another go at that statement?

    • Re:Irritatingness (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Textbook Error ( 590676 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @05:21PM (#12325136)
      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

      Here's an alternative explanation. You're a bit of a dumbass, and decided to bail from a privilege that most of humanity never gets a chance to experience (higher education).

      Anyone who decides to give up that opportunity because of a flaky IDE is a dipshit. Sorry to have to be the one to break it to you.

    • Re:Irritatingness (Score:2, Informative)

      by benow ( 671946 )
      The early builds were ass. They became much better over time.

  • All or only part? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by imemyself ( 757318 )
    What exactly is gonig to be OSS'ed? The entire thing or just bits and pieces of it?

  • Borland is realizing what IBM did (Score:4, Insightful)

    by thammoud ( 193905 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @04:04PM (#12324769)
    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.
    • Building value added plugins for a popular IDE (Eclipse) and people might pay more money

      Isn't that the truth. IBM jumped into Eclipse with WSAD, then moved to the Eclipse 3 core with Rational Application Developer. I found myself in the unfortunate position of needing the current cut of RAD for the portal toolkit plugin for WPS 5.1 - only to find they want over 4k for the 'value add'. Lots of extras in there like the modeling tools, none of which I needed...

      The EJB stuff is slowly working its way into
    • The gap isn't as narrow as you say. IDEA performs a lot better (and faster) than Eclipse.
  • 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.
  • jbuilder is a bloated piece of crap. it was pretty good somewhere around version 5 or 6, but since that time, you need damn near a cray to run it. what pisses me off the most is that you can't get older versions. viva la open source!! it also shows how much better the OSS dev model is than the closed version. jbuilder just doesn't hold candle to netbeans or eclipse. to get the same functionality, you had to spend hundreds for the pro or ent. version. i personally use jedit for most of my development,
  • If it gets me Brief keybindings in Eclipse, I'm all for it!

  • Incorrect News (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 23, 2005 @04:26PM (#12324877)
    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.
  • Eclipse has made the Java IDE market a commodity market. The best they can hope for is to become much smaller and sell value-added plugins. I bought the vi-plugin for Eclipse, but that model won't work for a company the current size of Borland.

    But hey, if Borland dies then maybe MS will do what they've always really wanted to do, which is to give away VS for free. VS2005 beta2 rocks.
    • I should've added that I'm sure Intellij is worried about Eclipse too, but made a smart move by instead of trying to compete directly with VS.NET they leveraged their expertise and produced a kickass addin for VS2003.

      • Which basically means that Borland is doing market research for Microsoft for the next version of Visual Studio. The easiest way to find out what your customers want is to simply borrow the ideas that some of them were paying good money for in the previous version.

        When VS 2005 (or whatever) comes out, what do you bet that it has most of the more popular Borland features.

  • From the article:

    "We will give customers something that's differentiated in the market and do it with a lot less investment on our part," Fuller said.

    So, in effect, he's saying: We let others do the basic work for us, and then make money by adding stuff on top of what they create.

    Granted, this may be the same thing IBM is doing with Eclipse, it's just that you seldom hear it voiced so clearly and unmistakably.

    As an open source/free software developer, I would think twice before contributing to such

    • The future is not in selling proprietary software; the future is in selling services for free software. IBM, for one thing, seems to have grasped that simple truth better than Borland, but I guess they are still learning.

      That's what FSF extremists wish the model will be, but if the software is doing its job then there should be little need for "services".

      The future is really proprietary software leveraging the bottom of the software stack which is free. Proprietary software can give back by making contr

      • That's what FSF extremists wish the model will be, but if the software is doing its job then there should be little need for "services".

        Funny how using the word "free" in connection with "software" gets you labelled as an "FSF extremist" immediately, but I can live with that :-) (ok you didn't label me an extremist :-)

        I make most of my money by deploying and customizing free software in large companies, and boy, I know for sure this kind of job is gonna be needed for a long time. It's not a function

        • Here you are simply saying the opposite of what I said. Any reasons that would turn it into a valid argument? Why should it be so? If free software development is capable of taking over the lower levels, why should it stop there? Is it not an uphill battle for proprietary software vendors?

          OSX

          Do you see games going open source anytime soon? The only reason why there is a quality open source java IDE like Eclipse is because IBM has deep pockets. Don't expect everybody to follow IBM's lead.

          Open source is
  • Wasn't Borland the company that promised to open-source its database project Interbase, then basically withdrew it and left and old build for independent development that thankfully someone took on (IBPhoenix)?

    They received their public praise from the open-source community, then began taking it all back gradually, having "certified" builds and then gave up altogether and made it a closed, proprietary, and expensive product again.

  • Borland has entirely lost its credibility (Score:5, Informative)

    by hobuddy ( 253368 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @05:45PM (#12325262)

    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.

    • SCM (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jbolden ( 176878 )
      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 [borland.com], UML modeling [borland.com]... 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.

  • Hope that includes Togethersoft! (UML) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Salamanders ( 323277 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @06:25PM (#12325516)
    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.

  • The future is open... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rdean400 ( 322321 ) on Saturday April 23, 2005 @09:07PM (#12326353)
    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.

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