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Java Programming

Borland to build JBuilder 3 for Linux 99

Posted by Hemos from the comin'-right-at-ya dept.
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. "
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Borland to build JBuilder 3 for Linux More

Borland to build JBuilder 3 for Linux

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  • Delphi for Linux (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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
  • I got Oracle 8.0.5 for Linux from my local bookstore. The CD was free, but it severely lacks documentation. There is an installation guide and some documentation about the Linux implementation on the CD; you still have to buy the paperback reference guides if you really want to use Oracle though. Unless you already own them, of course.
  • If it's an all-java version, why is it for Solaris? Why will the Linux all-java version be coming later? I thought the entire point of Java was the "write once, run anywhere" mantra.
  • Java is coffee right??

    What about Borland taking over linux development...and releasing a version of *Delphi* for Linux. That would be cool.

    I guess there would be a lot of people who would stick to C++ though...which would be good because my development costs would be 3 times less than theirs ;)

  • My first compiler was Borland Pascal 3.0 and I've liked their tools ever since.

    Of course I haven't done much Windows development in the last few years. This might actually get me to buy their stuff again!

  • Glade (Score:1)

    by sterwill ( 972 )
    I use Glade to build my dialogs (and it works very nicely), write soruce code to an empty directory, and I cut out the dialog construction code and place it into a class dialog wrapper. It works wonderfully, and if you take the time to name your GUI elements in Glade, the code it writes is surprisingly easy to maintain by hand.
  • l*nux...l*nux...l*nux
    Is your 'i' key broken?
  • 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.
  • Cool, I sent their customer service dept email asking for this a while back, I should now be able to ditch the bitch (NT) at the client's site.

    I use JBuilder2 all the time, its got good visual-edit/code-edit integration but has crappy performance/reliability at times. I'm pretty sure that this is because JBuilder2 itself was mostly written in Java. Does anybody know if the JB3 will come with the JOVE technology on Linux. That would be cool, maybe the speed will become bareable.

    Apologies for being off topic, and a bit troll-like, but I can't pass up this opportunity to bitch about Java. What a flaky, slow, confused, badly documented piece of shit. It's not the language that's the main problem - it's the system libraries (awt/swing/etc). They seem to written without a thought for speed/efficiency and are often broken in arbitrary ways. AWT/Swing with new event model has a great design, but crummy implementation. The alternative was MFC(euch), I'm still glad we went with Java, but I wish I had known about fltk a year ago.

    If I see one more fucking student thesis repeating Sun's propoganda wrt C++/java comparison I will scream. When I work in java I miss STL so badly - it takes 500 lines of java to do 50 lines of STL based C++, and the C++ will be much faster and more reliable (compile-time v. run-time errors). It's easier to write truly abysmal code with C++ than with java, and there are hundreds of pitfalls in C++ but you can make the same argument about pascal compared to C - power requires responsibility. Java and pascal are great languages for beginners, but experienced developers prefer to work without training wheels.


  • QT does seem pretty good. I don't think gtk-- is ready for prime time yet, and if you need the option of deploying on win32... On the other hand, I really don't like the fact that the code has to go through a pre-processor in QT, you're not really using C++ - I cannot believe this is necessary. Does anybody know if they fixed this in QT2.0 ?

    You should definitely take a look at a fast, high quality, cross platform, toolkit. It's not very rich in widgets, but you can write your own, and it comes with a deceptively powerful GUI builder. [easysw.com]


  • JOVE (Score:1)

    by joss ( 1346 )
    Jove is an optimizing native compiler for java. Except I don't think they're actually selling it yet.
    www.instantiations.com/javaspeed/jovereport.htm

    Yeah, I do know about pizza and JGL. Attempting to do STL without templates just doesn't work too well. If someone wrote a version of stl for pizza though, that would take away a lot of my antagonism towards java. Maybe if I get some spare time...

  • I currently use C++ Builder for professional development and it rocks. An X port (for Linux of course) would make my life!

    I can't think of a single event that would do more to accelerate the development of crucial Linux apps than that.

    Of course, this begs the question of which toolkit the vcl will be based upon :-) Since the win vcl is based on mfc's (through object pascal) it seems that qt would be the most likely candidate.
  • GPC (GNU Pascal), not GCC (GNU C/C++) does object Pascal - but only of the type supported by Borland Pascal 7.x. It does not yet support Delphi Classes. Free Pascal (aka FPK Pascal) supports the Delphi object model.
  • What can be worse than a proprietary language owned by a company?

    i think the difference with borland has been that they have been willing to develop langauges for the better good. i remember hacking out code learning pascal in cs101 using borland turbo pascal at college and wathced as the language matured....i left pascal and used 'c' (puffs chest out) but come backl to it when delphi was released. In that time pascal v3.0 morphed into object pascal. The differences are significant both language wise (and tool wise). borland aint no microsoft!


  • owl was cool, it (for those who never used it) wrapped up the win32 api in some very nice objects with full inheritance...competition with microsoft killed it off. as for bcc5 i never stopped using 4.52


  • i know that u can use cli for bcc, delphi but what about jBuilder? does win32 jBuilder allow for command line compiling?
  • yeah i get a bit worried about it being last on the port list but i guess the bugs will be ironed out. I'll take a slightly dated version that's stable to a new 'bells and whistles' version any day.

    nice to see they use the ms and sun shock troops to give the prod a good thrashing before linux version though :)


  • it's the little touches like this u can expect from borland. i'd expect that the l*nux version would be the same. the cheif reason u use a gui builder is for building the gui. if your have ever tried to build a tightly spaced form with text files? if u do this in vi/emacs yr a real sucker for pain....

    but i would urge all those considering purchasing jBuilder for l*nux to take a look at 'freebuilder' at www.freebuilder.org it's not v1.00 yet but then again jBuilder for l*nux isn't on the shelves and this ones free :)
  • Yes, and is also does not require a Full Time dba to keep it going, just a sweep every week or so to keep it tidy.
  • I would love to see C++ Builder for Linux. I would buy it. When forced to do win32 development, it beats the hell out of visual c++. It would be great to have a similar gui app builder environment under X11.

    dev

  • Yeah ... (Score:1)

    by Bwah ( 3970 )
    there is already some builder-like app for qt. Or so I have been told. Now that I'm thinking about it, I may have to go hunting ...

    dev
  • Builder apps can call mfc crap, which is why it ships with mfc, but builder can't and doesn't use it. VCL and MFC can coexist, but Builder itself only uses VCL. We're safe. :-)

    /dev
  • I've never used or seen anyone else use mfc in a builder app. Lotsa win32 sys calls yes, but mfc no. I guess that's probably cause I always hated mfc and vcl is such a dream to use ... I guess you have seen lots of mfc mixed into builder apps then?

    /dev
  • Can you agree to _that_ tiny little point at least, which is all I was trying to say? Since you didn't explicitly admit that "use" doesn't necessarily mean what you used (Heh! :-) it to mean, I mean

    Yeah. I can't really argue with that I guess. I just didn't like pascal/delphi too much last time i used it. to much like ada. Gack!

    dev

  • Who needs this GUI stuff?

    LONG LIVE ED!
  • I don't get this. What can be worse than a proprietary language owned by a company? Personally I refuse to touch things like Object Pascal and Visual Basic.

    I can tell you the story about Borland C++, their former flagship which they abandonded two years ago. If this had been Object Pascal, our company would have been in deep trouble. OK, it wasn't fun but we survived and ported to Visual C++ (yuck).

    Conclusion ... avoid proprietary languages at all cost. (Unless you make throw-away prototypes)






  • Well my point really wasn't about C++, I was targeting Delphi. If Borland drops C++, there are alternatives, but not if they drop Delphi.

    But to continue why we didn't choose BCB. Can you say OWL? At that time, BCB was not ready for developing large applications. And our trust that Borland would survive and continue to keep up with Microsoft weren't high. Not to mention that their last release of BC++ was one of the buggiest software I have ever used.

    And proprietary software doesn't become less proprietary just because it runs on Linux.
  • JB 2.0 was about 30% Delphi code. The help system has been completely re-written for version 3.0 and is much improved. The new version for Solaris will be completely portable, I tested it already on Linux and it works.
  • it doesn't refresh the display properly, it uses funky, non-standard Java classes like "GridBagConstraints2", and it's got a lousy deployment wizard.

    The GridBagConstraints2 was used to fill a gap in the GridBagLayout initialisation, compare the ctor for GridBagConstraints2 with equivalent code and you'll see what I mean. In addition the source for the class is included with JBuilder so you can simply move it in the package of your application and avoid depending on the JBuilder-specific jars. The new version is much more stable, has improved modules everywhere, including the help system and several Wizards.

  • Except the default code it generates is UGLY and it is very hard to modify if you ever get out of the enviroment. And the Visual Cafe greats event listeners for you? Arghhh...

    Not to write a shameful plug but that's why JBuilder has an actual Java compiler as part of the designer. The code generated is clear and it doesn't contain markers in form of comments. If you edit the code and add your stuff the designer will be still able to read the UI-specific stuff. We call this two-way-tools.
  • This is interesting because for years Borland C++ has been the most standard-compliant C++ on the market. BC++ has not been abandoned but migrated into BCB, it was the only logical choice. Now, VJ++ is one proprietary piece of software that will not see the Linux light for sure.
  • i know that u can use cli for bcc, delphi but what about jBuilder? does win32 jBuilder allow for command line compiling?

    Absolutely ! There's a command line compiler called bmj.exe (Borland Make Java compiler). It compiles java sources from the command line and does automatic dependency checking with minimal recompilation. Try "bmj -p your_package_name_here"

  • Sad but true, also the status JDK today on Linux doesn't allow to ship a product even if you had it ready today (sorry JDK 1.1 is not an option). On that regard Solaris is more mature but hopefully the Linux port of the JDK will be ready for the relase date.
  • Don't forget the other free DBMS's out there, especially the open source ones like Postgresql (http://www.postgresql.org) etc ;-)
  • I posted a bunch of times on their newsgroups saying effectively "Dear God, Give me Jbuilder on Linux", when I was developing a java application under windows under contract, windows constantly leeked memory and needed rebooting. sometimes I would have to reboot 6-7 times a day. it sucked.
  • There is a GUI Toolkit builder for GTK called Glade that may still be in development...

    Very buggy when I was testing it. But showed promise. It also didnt hamstring the programmer with too many features in its initial incarnation.

    I like RAD tools when used in parallel with text editors, shortens learning time in the beginning by giving you source examples of gui placement so you dont get bogged down in posistioning of components.

  • that was the theory, but it became rather 'write once - debug everywhere' :)
  • 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 :)

  • For what it's worth (as I post this over a week later) Inprise is still Inprise. Recently, though, we've "created" the Borland.com business unit to, among other things, produce software development tools. Inprise concentrates more on the "enterprise" side of things, notably with our CORBA-based VisiBroker product.


    Just thought I'd clear that up.


    Regards,


    Jeremy

  • The VCL is its own class library and is based on nothing but the Win32 API. Actually, the class design of the VCL is one of the reasons why Delphi and C++Builder are so nice. The problem is, it's heavily Win32-API dependent. It wasn't particularly designed with portability in mind. I think it would be quite difficult to implement the existing VCL library on top of Qt or Gtk without at least some degree of application breakage. Certainly, any app that makes direct Win32 API calls would break.

    The other problem, of course, is that Delphi and C++Builder (and, to stay on topic, JBuilder) are shrink-wrapped commercial software products. And if there's one thing that _has_ to be open source, it's the development tools. As much as I would love for Borland (sorry, Inprise) to release Delphi for Linux, I bet I'd change my mind the first time a library upgrade broke the package and I had to wait months for Borland to fix things.

    All that aside, I have to say I'd happily [have my employer] pay the $2500 for a copy of Delphi Client/Server for Linux. I might even buy JBuilder if I can find it within myself to care about Java.

    -Graham

  • "TooOldForThis" writes:

    I can't think of a single event that would do more to accelerate the development of crucial Linux apps than that. [porting C++ Builder to Linux]

    I can -- porting Delphi!


    Of course, this begs the question of which toolkit the vcl will be based upon :-)

    Yup.


    Since the win vcl is based on mfc's (through object pascal)

    What?!?

    What on Earth gave you that bizarre idea??? The VCL is written in Object Pascal, yes -- and MFC is a C++ library, which Delphi can't use. What Delphi gives you access to is the "good" old raw Win-API, as used in C (non-++) programming; and that is what the VCL is built on.

    If you fear MFC influence (I would), then what you should be wary of might be, ironically, C++ Builder -- because it can use MFC (and actually comes bundled with it, I think), whereas Delphi does -- and can -- not.


    it seems that qt would be the most likely candidate.

    On the contrary, a raw API like GNOME's seems more suited to build one's own class library on top of, in stead of fighting with, or at least "going against the grain of", another class library -- like QT -- that almost certainly isn't designed along the same lines as the one you want to implement.


    Christian R. Conrad



    Christian R. Conrad
    MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.
  • Bwah writes:

    "Builder apps can call mfc crap, which is why it ships with mfc, but builder can't and doesn't use it."

    No, it doesn't use it in its own IDE -- but linking to it in apps you build with it sure falls within what *I*, at least, would call 'using' it.


    "VCL and MFC can coexist, but Builder itself only uses VCL. We're safe. :-)"

    Naah. If 99% of all C++B-built *applications* use MFC, then either the port of C++B *without* MFC would be worthless, or we'd see a helluva lot of clamoring for a port of MFC, too. Fortunately, it is of course nowhere near 99% (anybody have any idea about the actual proportion?), but still: That *could* change. With C++B, we are *not* as "safe" from MFC as we are with Delphi.


    Christian R. Conrad


    Christian R. Conrad
    MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.
  • I was talking about "THE" VCL, and how it is built in OP. Where did I say that C++B uses a different one than Delphi?


    Christian R. Conrad


    Christian R. Conrad
    MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.
  • Bwah asks: "I guess you have seen lots of mfc mixed into builder apps then?"

    No no; in that sense, you're quite right, of course. That's why I said that "fortunately, it _isn't_ anywhere near 99%" (or words to that effect). Quite probably, as you say, it's closer to 0%... I wouldn't know, since I've never seen, nor will I ever*, _any_ MFC code in apps built in _my_ favourite Borland application builder.

    My point was only that since it _can_ be done, there _is_ a possibility that somebody, somewehere, is doing it. In that sense, C++B _is_ more of a "risk of MFC contamination" than Delphi, where that risk is ZERO*.

    Can you agree to _that_ tiny little point at least, which is all I was trying to say? Since you didn't explicitly admit that "use" doesn't necessarily mean what you used (Heh! :-) it to mean, I mean...


    Christian R. Conrad


    *) Unless they do something really stupid to it, in a future version...? Naah, may the Ghods preserve us!


    Christian R. Conrad
    MY opinions, not my employer's - Hedengren, Finland.

  • 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 /. , that they had done so, or anything...

    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.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Graphical layout tools like this will save _many_ hours of code writing
    Except the default code it generates is UGLY and it is very hard to modify if you ever get out of the enviroment. And the Visual Cafe greats event listeners for you? Arghhh...
    Nothing beats a piece of paper and a pencil to great a good layout. Sure, typing all the .setBounds sucks, say nothing if ou choose that abomination of GridBagLayout, but you do it once and it is exactly as you want it to be - most important you hand coded event model make sense and performs better.
    Of course for me GUI is a small part. RAD tools sure help if you do it every day, and do not care if anybody will ever have to modify, maintain or rewrite it....

  • If Borland does a port to Linux then I feel they could really shake up the industry.

    IMHO yeah, with emphasis. If they'd had Delphi out before Visual Basic (which IMHO is sadly inferior), they'd now own the windows RAD tool market. They may yet own the Linux RAD tool market if they move fast enough. They won't just have a time-to-market advantage, but also a we're-not-Microsoft advantage. And AFAIK Delphi is already very well-liked in massive, hellish, elephantine, necropolistic MIS departments. :)


    If anyone from Borland is reading this, do the port and I will buy an enterprise edition the week it is released.

    I've emailed them, and I got a vague response. If they get more requests, maybe they'll listen more closely. IMHO the fact that they've released JBuilder is a good sign that they're on the ball with this.

    I don't use C++ Builder any more, except in contract work I do for an ex-employer. I'm not so fond of the RAD thing on the whole. Still, if you are doing RAD, C++ Builder/Delphi are as good as it gets. In particular, the VCL (which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with MFC; I've looked at the source for both) is abstract enough (unlike MFC) that it wouldn't have to be broken very badly on an interface level if it were ported.


    "Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"

  • Last I saw the source (Builder version 1, Delphi 2) the two VCL's were identical ObjectPascal code. Builder can compile ObjectPascal just fine; I've written VCL controls in ObjectPascal and compiled and used them in Builder. At an old job I used mostly Builder but sometimes Delphi, and so I wrote VCL things in ObjectPascal so I could use 'em in both.

    The MFC thing isn't true, anyway. As many others have said, the VCL is its own thing from the ground up, based directly on the API.


    "Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
  • For those interested and not yet aware,
    There is a clone of JBuilder2, called FreeBuilder.
    Haven't used it, but it boasts the same features, and is available for Linux as well as Win32.
    Homesite is www.freebuilder.org, but is unresponsive today. Check FreshMeat.
  • Excellent point!
    I've been using JBuilder2 for some time now, and it does, in fact, seem to be written in Java - well, at least parts of it are. In a quick look through the dir structure, there are some .class files that seem responsible for the IDE and such pieces. The help system is particularly slow and clunky, so I suspect that this is Java as well. There is a traditional Win32 app install to it, there's an EXE and DLLs and INIs, but the system also relies heavily on JAR files, and things named IdeEnvironment.class. Hmmm...

    At this time, it's definitely platform bound, but, unless it relies heavily on JNI, a Solaris Java should be run-anywhere - unless Sun has embraced and extended Java in it's own favor.
  • Wow. Now THAT is impressive.
    Maybe Linus was wrong in his assertion that Java was promissing, but got overhyped on it's portability.

    Now if only it ran as fast as native code.. Hmm maybe TransMeta will see to that.
  • ...why Borland, who's main (non-Free) competitor in the compiler market is Microsoft, wasn't supporting any platform but Windows. Glad to see them branching out. Maybe we'll see a Delphi or C++Builder for XFree86 development?
  • Nope. Borland.com is now a division of Inprise.
    I mean what a stupid name INPRISE. I've always respected Borland for offering an alternative to M$ tools, but what a crummy name.
  • Interbase IS, as some have said, simpler to use and less maintenance-intensive than Oracle.

    However, it runs out of grunt pretty quick once you start getting into applications dealing with around a GB of data, intensive transaction processing, and requirement for fast batch throughput, i.e. enterprise-level applications. I've worked with both in medium and large sized companies, and speak from painful experience.

    Oracle leaves Interbase for DEAD performance-wise on every other OS including various Unices, and is much more extensible and flexible due to tools such as PL/SQL, etc.

    Oracle charge like wounded bulls for support, software and consulting. They won some award for the rather dubious achievement of outperforming Microsoft Product Support Services (that particular bar is EXTREMELY low), but were mentioned in the article as being even more expensive.

    Oh, and the Oracle front end tools SUCK. DEsigner/2000 generates form and report PL/SQL which fails the database engine's syntax checking, Developer/2000 is the clunkiest visual development environment I've ever seen. This is MHO, but it is shared by a number of Oracle consultants with whom I have worked.

    The RDBMS is reasonably slick, though.
  • >Delphi is the moral equivalent of J++.

    What do you mean by this? As Sun would have it (and the courts agreed to a significant extent), Microsoft put J++ out to attempt to wrest control of the Java initiative away from its open proponents (more truthfully, away from Sun) by "polluting" it with MS proprietary features and extensions.

    Are you really trying to convince us that Borland put out Object Pascal to stop those free software fiends threatening its domination of the software market with freeware/open source Pascal? If so, see your doctor and get your medication adjusted.

    Crap. Borland put Object Pascal and Delphi out as Windows development tools, competing with other Windows development tools, something which they actually do extremely well.
  • I have Borland C++ Builder 3, and it's a great development tool - for Windoze. I think Borland is making a brilliant move. Maybe I'll actually learn Java (I know C cold, and know C++ quite well, working on my Perl :), which I hear is a really nice language. (for some things, at least).
  • Delphi would change everything for Linux.

    I think most Delphi developers are so happy with Delphi they would rather have their clients reboot several times a day due to an inferior platform than use gcc.

    That locks an enourmous number of companies out of Linux because its not the Office suites that are the issue. It is the billions of dollars of custom software and inhouse apps - the business logic - not the office fluff that will hold the Linux explosion back.

    If they could port the VCL to use either QT or GTK as a compile option would be nice. Also we need the BDE.

  • A previous poster had the opinion that GUI's were not important. IMHO he couldn't be more wrong. True, it is the behind the scenes "command line interface" -able OS components which are the best foundation, but a CLI or character-oriented interface effectively uses just 2% of the available screen space at a time.

    As an example of this, while I am old enough to remember and have enjoyed text only (e.g. command line) games, does any one really think that games like Quake or DOOM aren't successful without being effective "graphical user interfaces?"

    Second point. Although I won't wasted the space to list them, many major software packages out there were developed using Borland's development tools, which have been top-notch since the late '80's. While their announcement only discusses JBuilder (I use their C+++ tools), this still offers value to the Liinux community because there is a huge pool of software developers who can be more productive in a Borland IDE than in just about any other IDE (Integrated Development Environment) becuase of outright familiarity with the tool-set. (I have begun using other Linux IDEs, BTW.)

    One more opinion. My hope --which I intend to communicate to Borland -- is that the most important thing they can do is provide top-tier support for using the existing standard libraries in Linux rather than coming in with their own. If they do this, I will be able easily rebuild my WinTel Apps in Linux. If I can come up with an e-mail address, I will post it later in this thread.

  • Hopefully this will push other vendors to support Linux development tools as well. Once a few DB products were released on Linux others quickly followed, it would be nice if this happened again (VisualAge Java is one of the 2 products I still regularly use Windows for). The more application tools that are avaiilable, the more applications that will be written. I hope Borland gets back some market share with this.
  • Can anyone tell me just how SQL-compliant InterBase is? Can it replace Oracle?

    Thank you.
  • It should be good and obselete by the time they release for Linux.
  • Played some today with the trial version of Symantec's new 'Visual Cafe' Java development tool. Very nice and easy to build graphical Java applications and applets. I'm mainly an console Emacs / JDK guy but graphical build tools seam to be a nice way to build complex Java applications. It's the tricky part to do the GUI layout in Java. Graphical layout tools like this will save _many_ hours of code writing.

    My 0.02 cents..

    - nr

  • End the carnage. Ban C++ now.
  • My experiences of every Visual-edit product on the market have been uniformly awful. At my last job we used Visual Cafe, mainly because it was the only tool available with a *usable* gui design tool (okay it was buggy as hell, changed code seemingly at random, crashed more often than netscape, all the supplied components needed rewriting and generally it made my life miserable...but the alternatives?). That was for 1.02. It got better, but even today it's flaky, unreliable and just plain annoying. I spent as mucu time coding around it's annoyances

    For 1.1 we looked at Visual Age, but decided it was too slow and big (64Megs min!), didn't support inner classes and had an *interesting* interface. Anyway, by this stage we'd invested too much time, effort and code into Visual Cafe. We knew its bugs, we didn't want to switch to a whole new load of bugs :) Apart from that I though Visual Age was really nice...

    My current place has a mandated standard of J/Builder. Nobody seems to like it much, and now that I've moved from the horrors of Java GUI development, to the pleasures of servlet development, I've switched to using XEmacs for everything. It's reliable, and does everything I need. In general I'd say that if you're not developing GUIs stick to either, that vi, or codewright, or something. Even if I was developing GUIs still, I have to say I'd be tempted to stay with Emacs. Less time spent fighting the tool's idiotic idea of how to do things, is more time spent productively.

    What's JOVE?
    _____________________________________

    Java's a nice language, and on the server I think it's lovely. There's no way I'd switch to Perl, C/C++, or even Python for the sort of stuff I'm doing now. However the AWT has been, and probably always will be broken. The code is shit. Javasoft never seem to fix anything until about a year later EVEN WHEN you give them the fix. Swing has a nice design, granted (though even there, there are some braindeadisms), but why didn't they just ditch the entire AWT and start from scratch. Uggh. As for the implementation...apparently recently they've actually started optimising it. Maybe it will end up as good as really badly written MFC code. Maybe... After a while you do start to wonder whether the only thing worse than a Microsoft programmer, is a Sun programmer. Sigh. We need an open source project to rewrite the windowing system so that it works. Any takers?

    You do now about JGL, don't you? It's basically STL implemented in Java. There's also a group in Australia (Pizza I think) who developed templates for Java. For that matter it's a nobrainer to implement oneself, and a more efficient version than C++'s as well (use casts).

    Cian
  • Java's networking classes are fast. The GUI stuff tends to be slow. Writing decent, optimised GUIs in Java is such a black art its ridiculous (though it has been done, and in 1.02 as well. The guys who managed it got bought up by Microsoft, since then nada...).

    Personally I think applets always were a bit of a stupid idea, made more so by the crap JVMs on all browsers. Writing an applet that works across all of them is an interesting exercise in futility. Shame really.

    Cian
  • 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 used to use Java, but its beans kept bunging up my machine, so now I just drink Tea and program C instead. What all this cross platform rubbish, if it ain't free source, and doesn't compile on a POSIX platform. I don't waste my time with it.

    The only true cross-platform application is a free source one.

  • That's good news, our server is Solaris(x86). I hope that it works for this platform because we have had problems in the past of software for Solaris working on the Sparc edition but not x86.

    Thanks!
  • 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.
  • Running on a platform and being supported on a platform are two different things. Java is write once, compile once, run somewhere, tweak, run somewhere else. Write once, compile once, run anywhere is not always true. Chances are that if it will run on linux by the time the Solaris version is released. JBuilder is good about being pure Java.
  • A _big_ chunk of JBuilder's code is written in Java (I've read some Borland guy saying 80%)... so they have got only 20% to actually port or rewrite.
  • I've heard a lot of good things about Glade.
    Where does it fit in? Does anyone that'as tried
    it have an opinion of it?
  • Well, true and not true....

    The VM has to be written for each platform, in order for the Java to run. In a simple marketing speech that's all that would need to be done. However, writing a virtual machine is not a walk in the park, especially when the platforms have extremely different chararteristics.

    The next step is to get the IDE and windowing stuff working. This is the area that you were talking about. It's sort of platform independant, but not really. There's a lot of work that goes into making sure an IDE works, and often the existing code has to be modified and made more platform independant.

    Smalltalk is a VM language that has been platform independant for years, but the same problems exist. You can develop on NT, 95, whatever, and run it on AIX, for example. However, the socket code on AIX is implemented differently by the OS than in Windows (for example). So you end up with platform specific code.

    The trick is to make the platform specific code exist in the IDE so that the users are not exposed to it. Of course, that's never completely true...

    I'm positive that the big commercial Java IDE's will be available on Linux in the very near future. It will be sweet having VisualAge Java for Linux...

    Dozer

    "The dumber people think you are, the more surprised they're going to be when you kill them."

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