Future versions of JBuilder are likely to be based on Eclipse, according to Raaj Shinde, Vice President product strategy and architecture at Borland’s Together business unit.
I interviewed Raaj earlier this week. “I have been driving the Eclipse strategy at Borland for a long time,” he explained. “I don’t look at Eclipse as an IDE; I look at Eclipse as a general-purpose framework for building applications. Especially now with Eclipse with the OSGi plug-in and the architecture they have come up with, to me it’s two million lines of well-architected, extremely well tested source code that allows me to build great applications”
Eclipse is certainly making great strides towards becoming the standard Java IDE. In the last two months, Borland, BEA, Sybase and Computer Associates have signed up as Strategic Developers, indicating a high level of commitment. Existing Strategic Developers include IBM and Intel, while HP and SAP are among those on board as Strategic Consumers.
In fact, Borland, BEA and Sybase all have something in common. Each of these companies has at some point promoted its own Java IDE. Borland has JBuilder, of which more in a moment. BEA has Weblogic Workshop, and used to resell WebGain Studio, which included Visual Café. Sybase had PowerJ – remember that? Visual Café was once a market leader.
As for JBuilder, it remains a very popular IDE. At the same time, there have been signs that Borland was struggling to compete with Eclipse. Eclipse has several advantages. First, it is backed by IBM. Second, it is both free and of high quality. Third, it is built using a plug-in architecture; calling it “extensible” hardly does it justice. It is an ideal platform for vendors to extend into a developer platform for their server products.
Not long ago Borland was still trying to take on Eclipse and build a rival tools platform. When JBuilderX was launched at the end of 2003, Borland emphasized its extensibility through the Swing-based Open Tools API, and made the basic version of JBuilderX free even for commercial usage. However, Eclipse already had too much momentum.
According to Shinde, “the Borland SDO [Software Delivery Optimization] solution is going to be built on two primary platforms. One is Eclipse, the other is Visual Studio.”
The obvious question is what will happen to JBuilder. Shinde indicated to me that the product will be rebuilt on Eclipse. “The framework on which we build the IDE can change at any time. For example, JBuilder 2.0 was built on the Delphi framework. JBuilder 3 was built on an entirely different framework, but it was still JBuilder. So we are going to bring our IDE expertise to the Eclipse world, because to be honest with you JDT [Java Developer Tools] is an OK IDE, but it is not a great IDE. So we are going to offer the Borland look and feel, the Borland experience with our IDEs on Eclipse.”
What will Borland gain from this move? It will be better placed to offer its Application Lifecycle tools to the huge Eclipse user base, and will benefit from the many open source and commercial Eclipse plug-ins. At the same time, this is a retreat. Despite Shinde’s comments, this is not the same as the move from an IDE built with Delphi (JBuilder 2.0) to a pure Java version (JBuilder 3.0). That was a natural evolution and was always planned. Transplanting JBuilder to Eclipse is more radical. I also asked about what happens to the Open Tools API. “There might be some code compatibility problems,” Shinde admitted. “but due to the nature of the Eclipse plug-in ecosystem I think that this will make it far easier for people to build interesting extensions to JBuilder in the future.”
Let me be clear: Shinde was not indicating that JBuilder will be abandoned. “We will continue to add value to that product,” he stated. “We believe the framework we build on top of is really irrelevant, it’s the feature set, the functionality and the value that people want out of JBuilder, and we will continue to provide that.”
Therefore I fully expect there will be future versions of JBuilder, shrink-wrapped in a smart box at the usual kind of prices. How different it will look from the current version, and whether it will use SWT or Swing, is a matter for speculation. However, let’s consider what this looks like to the casual observer. Borland will no longer have its own Java IDE. Borland is moving to Eclipse. It makes JBuilder harder to sell in my view. Some will simply move to Eclipse now – or perhaps to another IDE such as the fine IntelliJ IDEA - and not wait for the new JBuilder.
For more information on Eclipse, see this interview with Executive Director Mike Milinkovich, as well as the Eclipse site. Borland is at http://www.borland.com.
Copyright Tim Anderson 30th March 2005. All rights reserved.