News

Borland adjusts release strategy

• By John K. Waters
• December 3, 2001

The move marks a change in strategy for Borland, which in the past staggered its Java software launches. Frank Slootman, the company's VP of software solutions, said the new strategy calls for twice-per-year simultaneous refreshes of Borland's tools and app server software, timed for late spring and late fall.

According to Slootman, 90% of applications currently being developed by Borland users are servlets and Java Server Pages, while only 10% are Enterprise JavaBeans. Borland expects EJBs to constitute 40% of applications being developed and deployed by 2003, and that's the market the company is targeting.

JBuilder 6 includes a new graphical EJB designer that can create entity, session, and message beans visually, and relate the different types of beans to one another within the IDE. This is also the first version of the Java IDE that can consume and publish Web services. As in the previous version, JBuilder 6 can deploy applications to Borland's AppServer, and to competitive offerings WebLogic from BEA, WebSphere from IBM, and the iPlanet system from Sun Microsystems.

The new version of Enterprise Studio for Java includes four products: JBuilder, Rational's Unified Process best practices framework, a development-only version of Borland's app server, and Macromedia's Dreamweaver UltraDev Web development software, which is new to this version.

Pricing for JBuilder 6 ranges from $54.95 to $2,999 per developer seat, depending on the version. Enterprise Studio for Java is priced at $4,699 per developer seat without the Dreamweaver product, and $5,199 with it.

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