Borland JBuilder 7 review

Borland has considerable interest in making Web Services work, since it also offers support in its Windows development tools, Delphi and C++ Builder, and in Kylix on Linux. Therefore, the company can offer a single-vendor Java-to-Windows route, which is an advantage in these early stages of SOAP, where incompatibilities remain a problem.

Refactoring, optimisation and UML

Refactoring is a big topic today as the industry wakes up to the fact that more time and money is spent on maintaining and enhancing code than on first creating it. JBuilder Enterprise comes with new refactoring and optimisation tools. The editor has integrated support for common tasks such as surrounding a block of code with 'try ... catch', introducing a variable to simplify code, and extracting a section of code into a separate method. The OptimizeIt suite is a separate set of utilities, offering code coverage, memory leak detection, profiling and thread debugging. The code coverage module comes with JBuilder 7, while others are a separate purchase but integrate with the IDE.

JBuilder 7 includes a UML view in its designer, but this is read-only and not intended for full application design. In order to use integrated UML, developers must purchase the Enterprise Studio edition, which bundles Rational Rose Professional J. Integration is good and Borland is right to draw on Rational's market-leading product rather than attempting to create its own equivalent.

These days, everyone seems to be using Ant, the open-source build tool, and JBuilder now has integrated support. Although JBuilder comes with Borland's application server, the product targets other J2EE platforms, and this has been extended to include Sun ONE (iPlanet) and Oracle9i, alongside BEA WebLogic and IBM WebSphere.

A handy new deployment feature is the native executable wrapper. This allows developers to deploy a small native code executable that starts up the Java application. Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X are supported. It's also worth mentioning Team Source DSP (Development Services Platform). This is aimed at dispersed teams and permits secure connection to source code management over the Internet.

Ultimately, the business case for JBuilder is founded on its huge array of productivity tools, including components, visual designers, Wizards and utilities. It's excellent for building Swing interfaces, strong for database work and, unlike some tools, supports a range of application servers, including those from IBM, BEA, Oracle and Sun.

The case against JBuilder is that deployment costs soon mount up if you take advantage of features like JDataStore or, of course, Borland Enterprise Server. In addition, JBuilder is a heavyweight with its many Wizards and designers, and the leaner, brisker performance of a tool like Eclipse will be preferred by many developers. The price of JBuilder is fair, but being primarily a tools vendor Borland will struggle to offer the best value, especially bearing in mind the frequent and expensive upgrades the company produces.

Borland keeps pouring new features into JBuilder and the process is perhaps reaching its limit. The new mode for development tools is to be leaner and more modular, and more able to fit the tools around the way the developer wants to work. At version 7, JBuilder is a mature product, which is probably a hint to Borland that some radical redesign and simplification is due.

Author: Tim Anderson