News

Borland launches JBuilder 2005

• By John K. Waters
• August 16, 2004

Borland Software Corp. has announced the imminent release of the latest version of its JBuilder IDE. What would have been JBuilder 10 will be known as JBuilder 2005, beginning a new naming convention for the popular Java IDE, which is scheduled to ship in September.

JBuilder 2005 represents the third major phase in the evolution of this IDE, says George Paolini, VP and GM of developer tools at Borland. That evolution began with the integration of performance management capabilities from the company's Optimizeit product line, and continued with integration of synchronized modeling capabilities. This version adds requirements management, which Borland is integrating via its CaliberRM product, to that list.

'We see the development environment as the hub in a development process that will soon be inextricably linked to things like requirements management, modeling and design, and performance management,' Paolini says. 'And those changes are the result of a significant shift taking place in the market right now away from individual development and toward team productivity.'

Driving this trend, Paolini says, is a demand from business for better ways to provide more structured communication and collaboration between the business side and development shops. 'Those teams are speaking different languages,' he notes. 'What gets lost in translation between the requirements gathering and the design and workflow of an application through to development is what's causing the most problems. We think that's the biggest issue in development today.'

JBuilder 2005 provides developers with the ability to drag and drop requirements directly into the comments section of their code. The idea is to provide a structured environment that allows developers to know exactly what they need to work on. When those requirements are changed in the Caliber requirements document, those changes are reflected in the comments area.

'It provides the management team with the ability to see exactly where the developers are going, how much progress they are making and whether they are actually developing something that will accurately reflect those requirements,' Paolini says.

Along with the integrated performance management capabilities provided through the Optimizeit Profiler, Code Coverage and Thread Debugger, the new version will provide full J2EE component-level profiling with the Borland Optimizeit Request Analyzer.

JBuilder 2005 will also support JavaServer Faces and Web applications, explains JBuilder product manager Bill Pataky. 'The way we are approaching JSF is very similar to the way we approached Struts,' he says. 'Our developers seemed to like that quite a bit. That's why we stopped short of going for a full WYSIWYG solution, because we think that's a separate market.'

The new version also supports JDK 5.0, J2EE 1.4 and other new Java technologies. And it comes with new distributed refactoring capabilities designed to enable the refactoring of information and history that is shared among team members and across projects.

Borland partnered with security vendor Fortify Software to provide new security features in JBuilder 2005. Drawing on a tailor-made version of Fortify's Source Code Analysis product, the new IDE will offer new audit capabilities for detecting common coding errors and violations of recommended coding practices. The new Fortify security plug-in for JBuilder examines the code for security flaws during the development process.

Borland JBuilder 2005 comes in three editions:

1) JBuilder Personal Edition, which is available as a free download from the company Web site. It is a fully functional Java IDE that can be used at no cost with no commercial restrictions, according to Paolini.

2) Developer Edition, which is designed for Web application and code-centric development, and includes full Struts supports and profiling capabilities.

3) Enterprise Edition, which includes all the features of the other two, plus J2EE development support and a full set of wizard capabilities to help the enterprise-class developer.

JBuilder 2005 will ship this September in English, German and Japanese, and in French and Spanish versions by the end of year. The IDE will be available on the Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X operating systems.

For more information, please visit the company Web site at http://www.borland.com or the Borland Developer Network at http://bdn.borland.com .