Sunday May 01, 2005

Borland NOT open sourcing JBuilder

Turns out that the recent "big news" on Borland turning over JBuilder to the open source community may not be right after all. Apparently, it was a bit of mistaken reporting on the part of The Register.

jroller.com -> bdn.borland.com :

A recent article in TheRegister.com has been causing some confusion about Borland's future plans for JBuilder. The reporter clearly misinterpreted comments from our recent earnings call and, with no input from Borland, wrote a story that we had decided to open source JBuilder.

To be clear, we are not open sourcing JBuilder. JBuilder will continue to be offered, supported and enhanced as a commercial product. As we announced in February at EclipseCon, we will contribute to the Eclipse community (in areas like modeling), and also plan to leverage the openness and extensibility of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform as an integration framework for JBuilder ...

Well. All the more reason for reporters and writers to check up on their facts and figures, as my Digital Life / Computer Times editor has often reminded us "occasional contributors". Better to be a little bit slower and get your facts right, rather than try to get a sensationalist scoop, and end up with egg on your face, eh?

Anyway, it's a little bit too late for me. After getting the company I was in to pay up SGD $5000 per seat of Borland JBuilder Enterprise 7, and hanging on to it for the years I was there, that party's over. In the current economic climate (yes, I know, I keep harping), it is difficult to justify spending that kind of money on an IDE. In the current company, a co-worker asked me to try Eclipse, and wryly commented that "resistance is futile" (most geeks surely know where that line came from).

Okay, so, I've downloaded and installed Eclipse on my home AMD64, and it looks good so far. Syntax help (the "dot" feature for us "lazy, non-VI wielding farts" lol), browsing into source files including the JDK, debugging. Haven't tried remote debug and CVS yet, but I'd suppose they should probably work as advertised. JUnit isn't much of an issue, since I use the textui TestRunner anyway, so the test cases simply come out as "..." in the console. Will need to get used to the keyboard shortcuts (it might be quite a hassle to re-map everything back to my JBuilder-style keymap - or perhaps somebody has done it somewhere). Other than that ... well, the "real-time incremental compile" seems kind of neat. The "views and perspectives" thingy will take some getting used to. Of course, the best thing is the price, and the "I don't have to worry about putting reg436.txt somewhere and it's not working because someone else has registered it but is no longer using it but then I can't use it either unless I resort to a keygen or whatever" kind of thing.

(2005-05-01 22:34:09 SGT) [Java] Permalink

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