Borland Jbuilder

JBuilder is a JavaIde from Borland ( now Inprise )( now Borland again ). It provides the usual drag and drop, wysiwyg ui designer. The Professional version comes with a set of neat data-aware swing components for rapid database application development.

There is a free version available for download: http://borland.com/jbuilder/ ( was http://www.inprise.com/jbuilder )

JBuilder also supports pluggable add in's, like CodeSearch, JRefactory (RefactoringBrowserForJava) and JavaUnit (JunitWithJbuilder).

JBuilder is itself written in Java. Borland/Inprise touts this as its advantage, along the lines of "practice what you preach" and "we use the tool to develop the tool, so we're sensitive to getting it right." Plus, this contributes to the pluggability. But, Java is interpreted (even when optimized and with JIT), so JBuilder is not the fastest (Java) IDE you've ever used; helps to have a fairly fast processor, and LOTS of memory. (This doesn't bother me; I've successfully used it on: (1) a PC with an Athlon 500 MHz processor and 160 Mb RAM, running both Windows NT 4 and RedHat Linux 7.1; and (2) a Sun Ultra 10 with 333 MHz SPARC processor and 256 Mb RAM, running Solaris 2.6.)

The tool has i18n support. Real .java files are used as opposed to VisualAge. It is easy to know what a person should put into VersionControl.

JBuilder 6 has JUnit 3.7 bundled with it, and now provides some nice wizards and a built-in test runner right within the IDE. One can still use the JUnit standard test runners, as well.

CategorySoftwareTool