Borland -> Eclipse Why ? Why JBuilder is not Open Source ?

[Petar Banicevic]

Hi,



Just want to know opinion of other people.



1) Do you believe that Eclipse editor will be good enough as this one is?
Why? Do you really need some weird plug-ins to become available for JBuilder
2006?



2) Wouldn't it be better to make current editor or JBuilder developer as
open source and attract plug-in writers to this platform ? Is it necessary
to adapt the Eclipse and then become "open source" ?



I just wanted to tell you my experience. I believe that many programmers do
understand what I am talking about.



Numerous times I have seen many companies, even big corporations (telecom,
space agencies,) use tools that are free and only free. I had to say bye-bye
to JBuilder so many times that makes me freak out. And I develop for ages
and I see that phenomena for ages.



Borland if you are aware how these companies spare money, even on developer
tools, you would go for a kind of open source. I am not saying that Borland
should give all soft for free. My point is to set a Borland tools as a
standard tools - and finally throw away some stupid "all in one"
"professional" editors.



As I said: Just want to know opinion of other people. I might be wrong, and
Eclipse could be the right way to go. I am sure that I will miss old IDE and
editor, since I am using WebSphere from time to time and I know it well now,
but JBuilder rules.



Here is what Info World thinks about Eclipse.... I agree...


http://www.infoworld.com/IBM_Rational_Software_Architect_6.0/product_57909.html?view=1&curNodeId=7

[Jeroen Wenting]

Post by Petar Banicevic
1) Do you believe that Eclipse editor will be good enough as this one is?

No. Which is the reason I reverted from Eclipse to JBuilder as soon as I had the funds to purchase JBuilder 2005.

Post by Petar Banicevic
Why? Do you really need some weird plug-ins to become available for JBuilder
2006?

No. I'll keep using JB2005 if Borland abandons the current system for some Eclipse based monstrosity.

Post by Petar Banicevic
2) Wouldn't it be better to make current editor or JBuilder developer as
open source and attract plug-in writers to this platform ? Is it necessary
to adapt the Eclipse and then become "open source" ?

No. Leave it as it is. There already is a plugin architecture which has been available for many years.
Making JBuilder open source won't magically get people to write plugins for it.
Maybe making JBuilder Enterprise free will do so, but that would mean the end of JBuilder.

Post by Petar Banicevic
Numerous times I have seen many companies, even big corporations (telecom,
space agencies,) use tools that are free and only free. I had to say bye-bye
to JBuilder so many times that makes me freak out. And I develop for ages
and I see that phenomena for ages.

I've seen that as well as the reverse (companies that refuse to use anything that doesn't cost at least X where X is some large number.

I usually use whatever I want, if the CEO doesn't agree (and even knows or cares) he can try to prove to me that I'll be more productive with the CEOs favourite tool.
Of course I put my money where my heart is and purchase my own licenses.

Post by Petar Banicevic
Borland if you are aware how these companies spare money, even on developer
tools, you would go for a kind of open source. I am not saying that Borland
should give all soft for free. My point is to set a Borland tools as a
standard tools - and finally throw away some stupid "all in one"
"professional" editors.

How do you propose Borland makes money from en editor if they give away that editor for free?

[Petar Banicevic]

Post by Jeroen Wenting
I've seen that as well as the reverse (companies that refuse to use
anything that doesn't cost at least X where X is some large number.

Interesting ! Nice to hear....

Post by Jeroen Wenting
How do you propose Borland makes money from en editor if they give away
that editor for free?

I don't know. Well, they can charge for their libraries, xml parsing, db
access, etc...

But since they are leaving JBuilder Editor - I thought, why not try making
it open source, before it ends up locked in some archive.

Never mind...

[Jeroen Wenting]

Post by Petar Banicevic

Post by Jeroen Wenting
I've seen that as well as the reverse (companies that refuse to use
anything that doesn't cost at least X where X is some large number.

Interesting ! Nice to hear....

Post by Jeroen Wenting
How do you propose Borland makes money from en editor if they give away
that editor for free?

I don't know. Well, they can charge for their libraries, xml parsing, db
access, etc...
But since they are leaving JBuilder Editor - I thought, why not try making
it open source, before it ends up locked in some archive.

Because they plan to sell Eclipse (renamed Peloton) as JBuilder.
You don't want to release yet another free product onto the market, especially one that's superior to the one you're replacing it with in your commercial product lineup!

Eclipse is a disaster compared to JBuilder. Borland (nor anyone else) can make it as good as JBuilder without completely rewriting the core components to BE JBuilder.

[Mac]

I agree. Or perhaps I can not understand Eclipse.

I have tried eclipse. I have downloaded it 4 times over my 56k dialup
line and after a few hours I have removed installation and download
itself.

I really can not undserstand why people like eclipse.

As an example someone please tell me how can I use Eclipse to edit a
java file without creating a project or something like that. I just
want to edit my java file.

Netbeans on the other hand has come near to jBuilder. Version 4.1 final
has become better. Though I had numerous problems with it yet. (it's
internal tomcat was unusable after 2 days gave access denied all the
time and aksed for password which I was not able to fix easily, it used
to find errors from my correct source files etc...)

I should admit that I have never been comfortable with other IDEs after
I worked with JBuilder.

What a pitty that it has become so difficult for software firms to make
money from their great products.

Mac

[Jeroen Wenting]

Post by Mac
I agree. Or perhaps I can not understand Eclipse.

I used Eclipse for over a year straight, and I still don't like it much...

Post by Mac
As an example someone please tell me how can I use Eclipse to edit a
java file without creating a project or something like that. I just
want to edit my java file.

You can't, for some reason Eclipse can't see anything that's not in an open project.

Post by Mac
Netbeans on the other hand has come near to jBuilder. Version 4.1 final
has become better. Though I had numerous problems with it yet. (it's
internal tomcat was unusable after 2 days gave access denied all the
time and aksed for password which I was not able to fix easily, it used
to find errors from my correct source files etc...)

It's also in my experience a lot slower and an even worse memory hog, plus the refactoring support is far inferior.

Post by Mac
I should admit that I have never been comfortable with other IDEs after
I worked with JBuilder.

Ditto.
About the only editor I like is VI :)

[Mac]

Post by Jeroen Wenting
About the only editor I like is VI :)

:)

Something about 6 years ago I was Unix network programmer in a company
and I hated "vi" for sometime. Then I got used to it.

Then I discovered "pico" and "midnight comander's editor" and life
became easier.

But it seems to me that newer editors increase productivity very much.

Regards,
Mac

[Doychin Bondzhev]

Post by Petar Banicevic
1) Do you believe that Eclipse editor will be good enough as this one is?
Why? Do you really need some weird plug-ins to become available for
JBuilder 2006?

I'm not sure about this but I expect it will become at least on the level of
JBuilder when Jbuilder is available on top of Eclipse.

Post by Petar Banicevic
2) Wouldn't it be better to make current editor or JBuilder developer as
open source and attract plug-in writers to this platform ? Is it necessary
to adapt the Eclipse and then become "open source" ?

Yes it is a good option but many times when this was asced on the public
interviews with Borland staff the answer was always that they can't do it.

Probably part of JBuilder will evetually be opensourced as part of Borland
contribution to Eclipse platform.

Doychin

[Alexey N. Solofnenko]

After talking to people at JavaOne, the reason for the switch was
that all other projects (Together, CaliberRM, StarTeam, etc.) had to
support Eclipse in addition to JBuilder. So to save on development, it
was decided to support just one platform. I wonder what will happen with
Delphi IDE.

I saw Together on Eclipse demo and I was told JBuilder on Eclipse
looks pretty much the same. The main difference will be blue Eclipse
round tabs. Of cause, nobody really knows what will happen in the next
half year, but it looks this way right now.

- Alexey.

[Paul Nichols (TeamB)]

Post by Petar Banicevic
Hi,
Just want to know opinion of other people.
1) Do you believe that Eclipse editor will be good enough as this one is?
Why? Do you really need some weird plug-ins to become available for
JBuilder 2006?

Not out of the gate. But I hope Borland will add similar editing and
debugging features that are currently in JB.

Post by Petar Banicevic
2) Wouldn't it be better to make current editor or JBuilder developer as
open source and attract plug-in writers to this platform ? Is it necessary
to adapt the Eclipse and then become "open source" ?

Perhaps, but you will need community support to make sure that the IDE would
remain relevant.

One nice thing about a Borland/Eclipse marriage is that the Open Source
world keeps Eclipse up to date with all of the more modern frameworks.

There are Open Tools for Struts, JSF (including GUI dev tools), Spring,
latest JBoss plugins, Tapestry, Hibernate, etc. I would suspect that the
reason Borland is going to Eclipse, is not only due to the time it will
save in recreating these vast array of Open and JSR compliant plugins to
the base IDE, but also because Eclipse is rapidly becoming the preferred
IDE for both commercial and non-commercial support.

I too prefer the more professional features of JB to Eclipse and the problem
of trying to locate and plugins GOOD working plugins. Borland can add to
that basic framework (which is ok), and make it stellar while still taking
advantage of letting others who write alternate and newer frameworks, take
care of the plugin features.