Introduction

Borland JBuilder X has been touted as Borland’s most significant release in these two years. Building on the stable foundation of the previous releases, Borland JBuilder X Enterprise Edition introduces support for newer application servers, along with enhanced performances and better overall user experience.

With JBuilder X, Borland is taking application development into another level. Traditional development environments used to involve compilers, editors and debuggers incorporated into a single application. Software development took another leap with support for the whole application development lifecycle, integrating the designing, development and deployment process. The process involves a number of people, including architects, testers, programmers and product managers. The final part of the evolution revolves around increased collaboration. We are talking about seamless collaboration that is aided by programming methodologies like extreme programming and collaboration software. JBuilder X provides the tools for all personnel involved in the application lifecycle. The application allows architects to utilize UML, programmers to develop, test, debug and deploy code all using the same application, providing integrated workflow and smooth project management.

                                                                                  JBuilder X offers an improved development environment

Strictly speaking, JBuilder X comes in four flavors. There is the Enterprise edition, which the review is based on. It is the only version that includes support for UML visualization, Crystal Reports and plug-ins for major application servers (I am talking about WebSphere, WebLogic, Sybase Enterprise Application Server and Sun One), the Cocoon framework and lastly, an integrated web services designer. JBuilder Foundation and JBuilder Developer do not have the features mentioned above, although the Foundation edition is slightly better because of additional support for XML, JavaBeans, J2ME and finally, two-way migration. A version of JBuilder X also exists for the BEA WebLogic platform. This version of JBuilder is preconfigured and optimized for development and deployment on the BEA WebLogic platform.

The new IDE offering from Borland has support for various application servers

Installation

Borland recommends 768 MB of memory for JBuilder X Enterprise Edition, with 512 MB as the bare minimum. I tested the software on a system with 1 GB of RAM. Operation was smooth but resizing took a while at times. Aside from minor performance glitches at times, I was generally pleased by the performance of the compiler. Installation was speedy as well, taking my system four minutes, although a previous installation took twenty, no thanks to my computer dealing with other applications at the same time. The installation took up about 700 MB of my disk space, fairly justified, in my opinion. Resizing windows is still a hassle, taking a few seconds every time. In general, the software runs at a fast pace most of the time.