Borland JBuilder 7 review

JBuilder may well be a regular award winner and among the most popular Java tools around, but with this release Borland faces a new and powerful rival. The latest shake-up to hit the Java world is Eclipse, an open-source project heavily sponsored by IBM. Eclipse offers a free and highly extensible IDE that runs on Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris, QNX and HP-UX.

There are several interesting aspects to Eclipse. One is that it uses the SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit), which is a GUI API offering a thin layer over the operating system's native widgets. Microsoft couldn't get away with this, especially with Windows-only support, but IBM is doing so and winning friends for the fast performance of the resultant tools. Another aspect of Eclipse is that it's designed to be a universal IDE, initially targeting Java, but with support for C/C++ in preparation and potentially other languages to follow. Third, it's the basis for IBM's Visual Age family, replacing the previous SmallTalk-based products. Finally, it has polarised the Java community, with Sun a notable absentee from the Eclipse consortium.

Borland is part of the Eclipse group, although it's doubtful whether the company revels in this situation much. JBuilder is pure Java and Swing-based, which until recently has been considered a benefit. But the great performance of Eclipse, along with the threat of something approaching a standard Java IDE, must concern Borland. Still, JBuilder offers a different development model, based on visual designers rather than pure code. Eclipse lacks any sort of GUI designer, although with Java more prominently used for server-side programming this isn't yet a major factor for developers.

The biggest problem for Borland is that the company lives or dies on the success of its tools. Companies like IBM, Sun and Oracle aren't primarily focused on tools, but use them to promote their hardware, application servers or support services. Borland is showing signs of stress by repackaging JBuilder 7 to push developers towards its own application server.

Previous JBuilder releases have featured a Personal edition for non-commercial use, a Professional edition encompassing most of what day-to-day Java developers need, and an Enterprise edition with EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) support. The Personal edition remains in JBuilder 7, but the Professional edition has gone, replaced by JBuilder SE. This version is crippled by the omission of database features or any support for Java Servlets. Borland argues that Servlets and JSP (JavaServer Pages) are part of J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition), which is technically true, but many developers use these features without needing EJB or distributed transactions.

As a result, the only JBuilder version that makes sense for real work is now the Enterprise edition. Naturally, this cuts both ways. By promoting the Enterprise edition, complete with the Borland Enterprise Server and the prospect of lucrative deployment licences, Borland hopes to escape its dependence on tools. The other side of the coin is that loyal JBuilder customers, faced with a large price increase to pay for unnecessary features, may turn to other tools.

So, what's in JBuilder 7?

JBuilder 7 is a development environment built around an editor with visual tools. The main work area, called the AppBrowser, has a project pane showing the files in your project, a structure pane displaying the structure of the currently selected file, and a content pane with various views accessed by tabs. The content pane is the essence of JBuilder, letting you edit in different ways without worrying about synchronisation. For example, you can edit a Swing JFrame in the visual form designer or in the Code view, and changes in one view are instantly reflected in the other.