Support & Documentation

Support

Support from Borland comes in the form of Quality Central. Basically, it is the community bug-tracking system that will be coming to a website near you, or that is Borland wants you to think it is. You get to access it at http://qc.borland.com. You can also install it as a standalone Java Client or as a OpenTool. Installation was pretty simple in my opinion. After downloading the zip file, I moved the two jar files into the designated folder and after restarted the IDE, I was able to access the OpenTool from the Tools menu. There were about 2500 bug reports related to JBuilder, although few had any workarounds.

Feedback from Borland personnel was also scarce. But this is still a relatively new project that is still in its first stages, so I guess the lukewarm response is not entirely without its reasons. Technical support is also available through phone and email. Phone support exists in all major regions, where technical engineers will answer the phone from 9am-7pm, although hours may vary for different regions.

Quality Central can be installed as an OpenTool

Documentation

The help documentation provided with the new IDE looks fine at first. But sometimes the content in the documentation leaves me disappointed. For instance, the mobile applications documentation mentioned that the mobile tools are only included with the Developer, Enterprise and Mobile edition. The problem is, I don’t think JBuilder X had a mobile edition in the first place. On closer look, I realized that the documentation had screenshots of JBuilder 9. But that’s not all. I don’t know about others, but when it comes to reading the documentation, I prefer to navigate back and forth through the tutorials provided. Try to open a new window in JBuilder – Click on any menu to open a dialog window, the opened window and seize control and you can no longer navigate through the documentation. Perhaps Borland should look into this matter.